So what are my views so far? Well, it’s a highly competent CMS for starters - at one point I despaired and started looking at Joomla, but the way it models content disgusted me even more so that Drupal. Now, in this respect, I’ve probably been very lucky. In my last job, I worked for Box UK whose main product is Amaxus, a CMS. Amaxus has been designed from the ground up by some very smart cookies – in fact, mostly by one very smart cookie indeed - Dan Zambonini. The conceptual design for Amaxus is, quite honestly, a work of genius. The model that it uses is simple, easy to grasp and provides incredible flexibility. Of course, it does mean that rolling out a site is quite a lot of work, but with a commercial CMS, that’s where your money comes in – the implementation is the gravy; the professional services part of the contract is normally for this kind of product worth far more than the product itself. So from that perspective, I’ve been spoiled. I’m used to an excellent model to work with…and that’s where I got stuck.

Quite simply, the amaxus model is this: take a navigation tree. Each node is a page made of blocks. Blocks can do anything from picking a single piece of static content, to providing a list of content that’s picked uniquely for each visitor depending on their browsing history through the site. Content is created independently. One piece of content can exist anywhere in the navigation structure more than once. Once you get your head around that lot, you start to see just how powerful this is. Drupal is…well…slightly different. It took me a little time to get my head around it, so here’s a quick run down for anyone currently trying to get theirs around it.

In Drupal, content is the key. The navigation system is only there to provide a convenient way for a user to get to some content. Therefore, the content has to exist before the navigation structure. Now, Drupal makes it easy for you by adding a panel in the content creation page that lets you add a menu item to that content piece, but it’s a paradigm shift for me. The other thing to realise is that blocks are configured on a site-wide basis. So instead of configuring blocks in each node, you configure the blocks once – however, each block has a whole bunch of options you can specify that tells the block when to appear. I’ve used this on our website to provide different kinds of users with different menus – members, non-members, content editors and admins. I have to admit I’ve been frustrated a few times by trying to create a menu before the content, although I think I’m starting to get the hang of it now.

Anyway, I’m impressed. I’ve built a fairly complex site in less than a week and I’ve learned a lot about Drupal in the meantime. Development will probably slow down a little over the next month or so as I learn about the next two things I want to implement – a workflow engine and the associated flows, and a custom content type and associated views for callouts.

Taking everything back to first principles, we got a bunch of people together and tried to work out what we actually want from a website. It rapidly became very clear that the website was key to how we communicated not only with team members, but with external organisations. With that in mind, we decided that a complete redesign of the site was in order, with different sections of the website for different people – members, other 999 services, the press, the public, prospective members etc. That’s a whole lot of work and more importantly, is a layout that isn’t compatible with one person doing all the work. So we need a CMS of some sort.

Over the past few days I’ve been trawling through some CMS software. Specifically I’ve been looking at Open Source ones in order to provide flexibility and keep costs down. It has to be easy to use so that people can publish content. It has to be customisable and templates fairly simple to play with. I’ve looked at over 20 different CMSes and several names stick out as software that’s competent, well-written and easy to use while at the same time being flexble:

• WordPress – technically not a CMS, it is nevertheless very popular and has an extremely simple interface. It isn’t however powerful enough for some of the things we want to do.
• Joomla – this is currently one of my top runners. Very competent CMS from looking at it, it’s one of two going forward to the trial stage.
• Mambo – Very close 3rd, it just lacks a few features compared to Joomla that I wanted.
• TikiWiki CMS – This was recommended to me, but following reviews and comparisons, it’s probably bottom of the shortlist
• Drupal – Currently the top runner. My once concern is its complexity, but if the complexity is limited to the admin side, that’s fine – I’ll be the admin so I don’t mind learning my way around.

I suppose I’m fairly lucky that in my last job I worked for a company that wrote a CMS so I’m familiar with certain concepts and principles relating to CMSes – personalisation, taxonomy, navigation, content types, etc. That will probably hold me in good stead as I set up Drupal and Joomla for trialling. Hopwefully a clear winner will emerge from the two, though at the moment, Drupal is almost a full head in front of Joomla after just reading the docs.