Content Management Solutions

In our digital world, the number of content management solutions on the market can be bewildering. Our focus is on Open Source Platforms, and in the majority of cases we’ve discovered that they generally solve the publishing needs of almost all we’ve worked with.

Which CMS you use and choose really depends on what you need to do and what you need to accomplish. Initial questions we consider when working together include:

• What type of site are you creating? For example, a portfolio, blog, news or social networking site. Or perhaps it’s some combination of them all?
• What User groups and User roles do you want for both creating and viewing content? For example, do you need a site where viewers need to log in to perform specific functions or access certain content?
• What content types do you have besides text, audio, video? For example, are you pulling in feeds, allowing user generated content, or selling content?
• Do you need to manage multiple domains and subdomains with your chosen solution?
• Is your content purely digital, or do you need your CMS to handle print documents as well?

Once we start answering questions like those above, we narrow our list of possible solutions. There are many to choose from but we generally choose among and from:

• WordPress: to create multiuser blog/news sites and/or catalog/portolio sites where we don’t need users to log in or subscribe to get to anything. Scribemedia.org is WordPress. So blogs on CNN, Le Monde, Time and the the New York Times.
• Drupal & Expression Engine: when we do need to have defined user roles for site visitors. Also, if we need to incorporate e-commerce into the solution. We’re currently using Drupal for a Web documentary we’re launching in the fall that will eventually incorporate considerable User Generated Content.
• Elgg: if we need to create a Facebook type Social Networking site (although drupal can accomplish the same thing with the right modules installed). We currently use Elgg as a private network for those that we collaborate with. For example, film makers, writers, designers etc so that we can all communicate in one space/place.
• Pligg: if we need to create a Digg type user generated content site (although drupal can accomplish the same thing with the right modules installed).