CMS users: What are your pain points when you use any kind of CMS?
Hi,
I would like to know your opinion and experience about typical pain points.
Over the years I worked with a lot of different CMS systems:
- traditional like WP and Drupal
- headless like Contentful, Dato or GraphCMS
Each of them have their pros and cons, and it was relatively simple to create a website in most of the systems. But my biggest problem was always the maintenance and updates after the site went live. For example:
- How can the users test changes without breaking production?
- How can I modify the schema and set it live? (maybe test breaking changes)
- What if users make mistakes? (and they do all the time)
Each CMS offers some solution for my problems above, but usually many workarounds.
So, I'm really interested to hear your experience :)
Have a nice day.
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Have you tried Wagtail?
Hi Andras,
Here is an article on the pros and cons of a headless CMS:
https://buttercms.com/blog/headless-cms-advantages/
I think this would be a great resource for you!
Depends on the scale.
At large scale, a dev/pilot environment is worth it because many contributors may make changes to schema, layout, data, whatever.
A production backup setup is needed just in case.
At small scale, I found the single production env, with at least daily backup system in place with a month retention safe enough and convenient. When a mistake is made, you fix it, or you roll back the most recent backup.
Resource and maintenance time costs matter more or less depending on the context, which is mostly a matter of scale (number of users, number of contributors).
Optimising those costs may be critical as it often makes the difference between a time and cash bleeding project and an efficient profit making business
Hi,
thanks for your message. I agree with what you wrote.
Do you use any CMS at the moment? Based on your message I assume you have quite a lot of experience working on content related projects.
I have been doing software development for a while, and set up many systems for customer mgt, and/or general content mgt, process work flows, along with ecommerce.
Yes I use some CMS, WordPress for general use cases when customer facing content (ecommerce or else) is a major aspect. Custom open source ERP for business work flows and/or customer relationship mgt.
There isn't one solution suits all, for sure. There are certainly solutions hardly fitting anything at all though. It's important to understand what each piece of software is giving you and at what licensing/hosting/integration and maintenance cost. A mammoth effort for comprehension I have to say. Keeping yourself well informed is important, anything where the information at hand is evasive is better staying away from :)
I also used WP for bigger projects, and usually it was pretty difficult to work together with multiple content creators. So multiple staging environment would have been handy.
How did you published multiple content items at the same time? Let's say there is a bigger release with many changes. Did you write a script
No. Even at large scale, contributors would publish content that follow existing patterns directly to production. If the content itself is critical, you get it peer reviewed before getting it published (with cms such as wp, it would be a draft entry/page/product/whatever).
For new type of entries, or unfamiliar type of content the sandbox or other staging environment gets changed, then reviewed mostly for stability and quality, then those changes are made to productions as there shouldn't be any surprise.
I found this process to work fine. If not, perhaps the contributors aren't due diligent. Contributors are responsible/accountable for their actions to some degree. If not at all, nothing really can save you.
Interesting. Let's say there is a new marketing campaign where multiple contributors created multiple content items (no new type of entries). How would you publish all these items at the same time? You ask all the contributors to publish their changes 12th of December 14:00? Or everybody labeled their content as "marketing campaign XY" and you used some WP plugin to publish every labeled entry?
Did you use any CMS with staging environments?
I think your marketing campaign case concern lays in the mgt side of it. Ideally you have a campaign manager for each campaign, that individual coordinate with other contributors content and makes sure the campaigns runs properly. With whichever plugin for campains you are using. Unless I'm misunderstanding the use case.
Multi stage environment for CMS code changes and testing yes. Code changes pushed to production in a non automated way so far, because it isn't time consuming for this type of software, and sanity checks are manual anyway. There could be cases where you need to have a CI pipeline. Very useful when making risky code changes often, again I don't see a use for that on what I've been working on.
You understood the case correctly. Thanks, really helpful feedback. There are so many different use cases and ways to use a CMS. I needed some input from different people to validate the idea I have in mind.
We built a homegrown one with AWS s3
Why did you choose to build your own?
How can the users test changes without breaking production?
How can I modify the schema and set it live?
What if users make mistakes?
Hi,
Thanks for your feedback. Are you an active cms user? If yes, which cms do you use and why do you like it?
Not active anymore. I have lots of experience integrating headless cms and more traditional cm systems. All of them have their drawbacks. I enjoyed working with the SAAS solutions and the smaller traditional systems such as Craft CMS.