Mon, Jun 4, 2007

Build styleguides into content management systems

by Austin Govella

All organizations need styleguides, but they're useless if they don't appear adjacent to the content.

Comments

I’ve been working on this “thing” off and on for quite a while. It’s like a CMS-tivus for the rest of us.

Anyway, I just ditched contextual help and assorted meta data in the sidebar in favor of surfacing the styleguide.

You’re probably wondering how I would be able to write a styleguide for people I don’t know, managing sites I know nothing about, and I can’t. The CMS has a mini-CMS built-in to the Admin system for managing whatever styleguide the site needs.

Content management systems — almost universally — have two huge problems. First they force you to learn crappy, difficult, awkward to use interfaces. Second, if you’re able to learn how the technology works, you still have to learn how your organization prefers to work. Assets need certain sizes, formats. Titles should be one way or another. There are rules for text formatting as well as meta data.

All organizations need styleguides, so I put one in the CMS. Surfacing it adjacent to the edit interface is such an obvious, bitchin’ idea, I had to share. :-p

Talk About "Build styleguides into content management systems"

varun said:

I have worked with a lot of Open source CMSs and most of the times it gets really crappy when you have a lot of content. Most CMSs are not at all user friendly. Also I found that its easier to build a CMS from scratch according to the needs of the organisation rather than try to port some damn CMS into our reqs.

Mon, Jun 4, 2007

Austin said:

Varun, I totally agree.

Not only do most developers have lots of experience solving these problems from scratch, the number of quickly maturing, light-weight frameworks makes developing custom CMSes even easier.

Mon, Jun 25, 2007

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