Building an Anti-CMS (and how it's changed our web team)

Michael Nolan (Oct 10, 2009)
Talk at PHP North West 2009 (English - UK)

Content management systems rarely live up to their promises. They’re hard to use, limit creativity and stifle innovation. Decentralised editing leads to poor quality copy, duplication of content and pages which haven’t been looked at since HTML 3.2 was new. At the other end of the scale you face problems of overloaded web developers who don’t understand what they’re publishing to the web, constantly fire-fighting with no time for new developments.

At Edge Hill University, we’ve tried to navigate the middle ground by deploying or developing tools appropriate for the sites we want to create. Using structured content management we can keep our sites fresh, pushing information out to places where it’s relevant.

The foundation of all our sites is the Symfony web framework. This session will look at how our development team has made the change from working with static pages, Dreamweaver templates and classic ASP to a modern PHP framework encouraging more agile development practices and focusing on delivering usable systems.

As a web applications developer turned “management”, I’ll try to give both sides of the story.

For the coder!

* sell the benefits to the business to help persuade your boss
* develop yourself by learning from other people’s best practices
* create cool stuff quickly and easily

For the manager!

* get more out of your developers for the same level of resource
* make marketing central to your website
* develop your staff without the need for costly certification

I don’t have all the answers, but I’ve got opinions about almost everything!

Quicklink: http://joind.in/621

Slides: Building an Anti-CMS (and how it's changed our web team)

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Comments

Oct 10, 2009, 21:23 by Kewley

Very interesting talk. I liked your take on the classic CMS and enjoyed listening to some of the things you've done with your system. Overall a very enjoyable talk.

Oct 10, 2009, 22:48 by GizzmoAsus

Some interesting concepts about how content writers are not interested in anything except the content they write for the pages, however the whole concept of Anti-CMS still manages to elude me. To me utilising a framework of sorts to create separate interfaces for content writers is still providing a CMS style structure for them, its just how you utilise that same content across different websites that removes the typical CMS feel from the whole process.

Great presentation though and I will definitely be looking at a few of my sites again :)

Oct 11, 2009, 18:08 by Eli-T

Well delivered talk. I was unclear how the problems levelled at CMS in general were applicable though - they seem more about how you implement your site, not necessarily about what framework you were using.

Oct 11, 2009, 19:08 by rooster

I was considering giving this talk a 3 based on the fact that I was not expecting the "use a framework" talk that we got - however I realise that the introduction clearly mentions this, and it's my fail for not reading it! In fact, based on that, Michael delivered everything he said he would - and whilst not going technical enough for me, it was presented well.

Oct 11, 2009, 20:18 by anthonylime

We've had similar experience using Symfony to deliver "content-managed" sites to clients so I understand where this was coming from. I dont think the presentation lived up to the title - which was by far the most intriguing in the conference, perhaps just a good old fashioned conclusion at the end of the benefits of model driven content managements would have helped?

Oct 13, 2009, 08:31 by Anonymous

Interesting and well-delivered talk. Nice to see the bigger picture.

Oct 13, 2009, 19:17 by loonytoons

A well presented talk, always interesting to see what approaches others use to fulfill certain requirements.

Building an Anti-CMS (and how it's changed our web team)

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