Thoughts on CMS

One thing that drives me mad is how every content management system (CMS) out there is now based around the concept of blogging, and yet most companies and simple website designs are still reliant on fairly basic static pages. As web developers, we go out and find the most advanced *blogging* tool there is because it’s stable, consistent, and easy to setup (read: WordPress…almost), and then watch as the client sits back and doesn’t actually post content in a blog-centric fashion.

This doesn’t surprise me. After all, if they hired me to implement their website, they probably don’t have too much information that needs to be critically shared on a regular basis, and unlike bloggers who are seeking to provide fresh content, get readers, and thus ad revenue; they don’t have much incentive to publish. (Look at me!)

As I worked away on fbcedmonton.ca which I setup with textpattern a while back, I started to drive myself insane realizing that in order to create a static page, you need to:

  1. Create an article (blog post)
  2. Create a “page,” or essentially a layout method that is statically selecting that post ID.
  3. Create a “section” or area for which the page will be served using a specific themeset.
  4. Create the link to the section within the navigation if an automatic nav generation tag is not in place.
Of course, if I just wanted to post an item to the blog it would have been one simple step. But really, our church doesn’t use its blogging features and the website would have been much better implemented in something more static-page oriented. Maybe I haven’t been looking hard enough, but it seems like a simple static-page CMS is no longer existent in favour of blog blog blog.
Which is fine. I guess I’ll stick to my php includes and raw code. 
But hey if you know of something simple out there, let me know.