What to do about a CMS

I’ve been looking at content management today. We need to upgrade our current CMS as the front end isn’t giving us the flexibility we need. There are a million CMS products available, all offering more simplicity than the next, the big list of corporate clients, the 30 day trial and sandbox etc.

Most products centre content management around the web pages, using in-page editing for ease of use and simplicity. I installed a copy of DotNetNuke 6 to take a look at, works really well with its flawless AJAX editing, plug ins and extensions. The thing is, we already have a database schema in place. when we set about this project a few years ago we always thought that the front end would be replaceable and it was the back end that we were going to get right. At the moment our front end is a simple table editor, and it’s this we’re looking to improve.

This is where I’m having the problem, we don’t need everything that comes with an off the shelf CMS, forums, galleries and alike. We’re just looking for a flexible table editor that gives us some WYSIWYG functionality for the editors. The .NET MVC process looks like it would do the job, but I don’t want to have to rebuild everything just to give us a WYSIWYG editor, there’s got to be more result for the work involved.

What to do about a CMS.