Crappy CMS

I remeber well Brent Simmons’ proposal of a“Law of CMS URLs”:

The more expensive the CMS, the crappier the URLs.

Today I had the chance to work as editor with the WebDB portal platform from Oracle 10g Application Server. It is pretty modular, but it is a pain in the a** to really get to editing content fluently. The system might be powerful – but the front end makes a lot of that power vanish.

Yet, nothing I have seen comes close to structured editing a page with the outliner of RadioUserland + Manila + metaRenderer Plug-In + docRenderer3. It is the most elegant way to have layouted pages without touching HTML. And it is unbeaten for some years now.

My second favorite combination is Zope + ExternalEdit + ReStructuredText (and maybe with Plone or ZWiki). This allows click-editing any content in any local favorite editor. The ReStructuredText is an equisite ACSII-to-HTML converter. It doesn’t get first rank in my view because editing an outline still beats the ASCII-editor. You need to know slightly more formatting rules to get beautiful HTML.