What is the best CMS? < Real Story Group Blog

When Maslow penned his famous hierarchy of needs, it was all basically revolving around convenience and comfort desired by human beings: in food, sex, creativity, confidence, family, and so on.

The Web CMS world is not much different – organizations just want to quickly and painlessly pick “the best CMS,” as one of the fundamental layers of their technological existence, and move on to the next levels in their hierarchy of needs.

And hence, the most commonly asked question becomes: “What is the best CMS?” I consistently hear it in our subscriber inquiries, in blogs and forums, on Twitter – everywhere. And this is also the most wrongly worded question in the industry. Just like with Maslow and his research, when he wrote, "the study of crippled… specimens can yield only a crippled psychology and a crippled philosophy."

Here’s an example of a recent description (sic) in quest for the “best CMS” grail I recently encountered:

“I want a CMS which:
- is SEO friendly (Very important)
- is Google Ads friendly
- is good for affiliate marketing
- is easy to use
- creates a proper website that doesn’t look like a blog”

And that’s why my job never gets boring, because every enterprise I work with has a different set of challenges and a different “best CMS” that best suits their needs. It may be something very basic, like the example above, or something much more complex.

Nevertheless, one of the most important things to do when selecting a new CMS is to define your overall strategy for the web, figure out how it will support your business goals and objectives, and then move on to the discovery process of interviewing your major stakeholders in order to craft testable scenarios and use cases.

Selecting a CMS is far from jotting down a list of requirements and functionalities. It is about doing your best in preparation and homework, if you want to get the best outcome. And the "best," in the case of a Content Management System, will be a CMS that most closely -- yet rarely perfectly -- matches your present and future needs.

Excerpt from the CommonSpot Content Server Evaluation

Web Content Management Evaluation Stream looks at... Social Media Services in PaperThin CommonSpot

"Support for social applications has been surprisingly slow. The product now comes with wiki and blog applications (plus a calendaring app), but these pieces feel more like proof-of- concept prototypes than..."
(p. 878)

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