In the previous post, I railed against custom code, then made a wane effort to defend my decision to create a custom CMS. The TKM Website Manager, which is currently only available to my clients, but which I’ve been debating releasing under the GPL or MPL, was designed to address a fatal flaw I’ve seen with most content management systems out there. Specifically – it works the way users expect a website manager to work.
We have trained users to think of web sites in terms of pages and URLs. In the past, when we worked primarily with static sites, we’ve given our users tools like Dreamweaver or Contribute to make content updates – tools that are either wildly dangerous if the user doesn’t have the time to really learn them or wildly inadequate, especially now that a majority of sites are dynamic and database-driven. Despite those flaws, they at least stuck with the page/URL paradigm.