Functional Usability of Web Content Management Systems

Econtentmag.com has a great article on Content Management Systems, here is an extract;

In Part I of this series, [I] looked at CMS interfaces and found that in general, users come to CMS projects with diverse expectations, leaving vendors struggling to match a product out of the box to a prospective customer's particular scenarios. As Jared Spool, founding principal of User Interface Engineering, puts it, "A CMS product is designed for an ideal, generic world, but none of us work in that world—it's like trying to sell everyone an average-sized shoe."

So here in Part II, [I'll] examine usability through the lens of system functionality. What does it mean to have a usable workflow? Can a "Help" subsystem make up for the inevitable gaps in user training and understanding? How can authors find what they need? To the extent that you can answer questions like these for your CMS project, you are well on your way to developing a more usable—and therefore, by definition, a more effective—content management system.

There is something to Spool's footwear analogy: CMS projects do come in different sizes, and system usability problems frequently stem from mismatches between the width of the problem and the girth of the proposed solution. But just as often, [I] think, CMS users find a system less-than-usable because the way specific features are implemented do not match their needs. For example, one Web site we'll look at below, the award-winning FirstGov.gov federal portal, publishes a scant 800 pages with only a handful of editorial staffers but nevertheless works off a deeply fine-grained content model accompanied by quite intense metadata requirements. For FirstGov, a prototypically "small" CMS won't work.