Why developers hate content management systems

By Robin Macrae | 2010-07-06

This is a companion post to Why developers hate content and, in the same fashion, the seed of a topic which I intend to develop as I collect more examples, ideas and resources.


Do developers hate content management systems for reasons apart from
the fact that they are content repositories? I believe that the answer is yes
but that this is of lesser importance than their antipathy for content.


I found the following using the developer
hate content query:


  1. Things We Hate About Content Mgmt (Irina
    Guseva    ,
    Random Thoughts on
    CMS, WCM, ECM and Other Acronyms    , 2009-10-23; 3,000 words) is a report on a group of analysts, journalists,
    vendors and system integrators to Wave on a topic
    that was decided when they gathered; namely, a mindmap of things we find
    annoying in CMSs.     [See also her Implementing a CMS Costs More Than Buying a CMS.]

  2. Wave experiment: Things We Hate About Content Management
    (2,550 words; aka Experiment with writing in the
    wave    ) (Technology of Content (Justin
    Cormack    ).
    See the links to other blogs’ posts on writing in Wave
    including Irina Guseva: Random Thoughts on CMS, WCM, ECM
    and Other Acronyms     [above].

  3. I’m a developer, and I hate SharePoint (Yakko Warner; 1,000 words) is a rant about his experience as a developer in a SharePoint project. He concludes with … we’re stuck with a tool that just refuses to do the job, and tasks that should take half a week are becoming impossible to do in two.

  4. Why Developers Hate WF and Why They Should Get Over
    It     (David Starr, 2009-04-05, 825 words) is a low key rant which concludes on a positive note about how Windows Workflow Foundation is enabling users to work with things like services, business logic and data. While not referring to a CMS, his opinions and observations are relevant nonetheless.
  5. Understanding Web Content Management Deployment (2009-07-19), a blog
    post by David Hillis (Ingeniux Blog, Ingeniux
    Corporation (CMS developer blog), Noteworthy people (t179_IN)    )
    reviews deployment options (how a website is published and delivered) in Ingeniux CMS and is illustrates some of the complexity developers face in this aspect of a project.

See the discussion of whether content management is an application
or a platform (the latter requires deployment and development) in
Content Platform vs. Content Application in
8 ECM Predictions for 2010. Cited in
8
ECM Predictions for 2010 (citation); CMS and ECM trend predictions for 2010,
Workspace (t159_x30).2010-02-01


See the brief consideration of administrating web apps versus managing web sites in Apps are Sites, Sites are
Apps in
#jboye09 8 Key Trends in Web Content Management Architecture
and Standards (David Nuescheler,
CMSWire) . It is listed in
8
Key Trends (Nuescheler) (citation); CMS and ECM trend predictions for 2010,
Workspace (t159_x30).2010-02-01


Holistic Information Management (Alan
Pelz-Sharpe, CMSWatch Blog, 2010-03-17) addresses the issue of
technical people never having been in the position of an end user, sitting
there day in and out trying to manage, or even frequently access
business-critical information and end users who had no concept at all of such
concepts as “check in/check out”, or “a single source of
truth.”2010-05-17

Posted in Developers