Why Open Source Content Management is important

“With more than 70 well known open source Content Management Systems available, why do you guys even bother?” We get asked this question all the time, and it’s a pertinent one. Yet, CentricMinds continues to grow quarter on quarter signing up partners and supporting new customers. How can this be? Surely customers aren’t paying for a CMS, when they could choose an open source content management system for free?

We love open source content management systems. Open source fosters innovation, and helps drive change and improve on best practice. Open source CMS projects are important on many levels. They collectively educate the masses on what content management is all about. In most cases content management systems are the fundamental building blocks of the web. Some of the most visible web destinations like Facebook, YouTube and Flickr are largely powerful and scalable web content management systems.

It’s always the face to face conversations with open source aficionados’ who’ve poured months of their time into building web destinations on Drupal, Joomla or Pligg who interest us. What draws them to come forward and ask the question “why do you guys even bother?” It’s because they know about the holes, the weaknesses, and the non-intuitive nature of most of the tools. They’ve been on the frontline and they’ve taken a few hits for the team. The scenario where 100 non-technical people in any given enterprise are expected to feel empowered to manage an Intranet or Internet using technically verbose tools is what keeps their inbox full with support requests. The fact that questions concerning which database should be selected are more important than how user adoption will be measured. Open source content management systems are still largely designed for engineers and not business users. As a tangent, would the iPod be successful if Apple ran it as an open source project?

CentricMinds has worked hard at focusing on the user first, and making the technology as transparent as possible. Granted, any capable engineer could develop a rudimentary content management system in a weekend using PHP or Rails. It would have all the basics too. Create pages, manage site structure, control CSS, etc. But the user centered approach would still largely be technical by design. Successful companies in any industry invest substantial time and money on innovation and design. Given there are more than 70 open source content management systems to choose from largely suggests that the tipping point between form and function is yet to be reached.

CentricMinds develops Web Content Management Systems for the enterprise.