Six Apart News & Events: April 2005

Rojo, an interesting new web-based aggregation service, has just announced their official launch. Though they've got a complete tour of the application, some of the highlights that distinguish them from a simple feed-reading service including social networking features for sharing content, tags and comments on individual items, and a recommendations engine.

Forbes online picked up an Associated Press story about the eleven blogs being published by the editorial staff of the News & Record in North Carolina.

The broad range of Movable Type-powered blogs have earned high praise from others in the journalism business. As Editor & Publisher said:

"When the paper's overhaul is complete, it may be a model for the sort of 21st century paper that many journalism big thinkers have been talking about, chewing over, and confabbing on for the last few years," wrote the industry-watching magazine Editor & Publisher. "Greensboro will be the first place where this conceptually newfangled newspaper actually exists."

Mike Davidson has just announced the release of sIFR 2.0. This popular combination of slick javascript and smart use of Flash lets you choose custom fonts to display headlines on a website, for situations where the presentation of your page makes these considerations important. You can see an older version of sIFR in action on sixapart.com, and the new release improves the way the technique behaves when people have disabled or blocked Flash, while still providing very accessible content on your page.

As an added bonus, if you use the technique on any web page that displays comments, you can get a free debate about the relative merits of Flash, HTML, CSS and other presentation and display technologies!

Congraulations to Mike and his collaborators on the new release.

A good friend is often one's harshest critic. This came to mind while reading this post Jason Kottke writes about the "New Internet" and, more specifically, Six Apart's role in creating "a black hole for creative people". I can feel comfortable in debating his opinion because I respect Jason as a friend and a peer and, in the past, have questioned him privately on his opinion of what makes a respectable company. Because of this relationship and my respect of his opinion, I've decided to break the perceived Six Apart oath of silence (you should see the initiation ritual!) and respond to his post.

Jason writes:

A person who -- when she was unemployed 3 years ago -- could spend a couple weeks in releasing a neat web app for anyone to use because she wanted to or could say what she wanted on her blog will now be putting all her coding energies into an application that serves a few customers & needs to be cash-flow positive and won't have the time to post anything to her blog (and can't say much about what she's working on anyway unless all her readers want to sign NDAs).

As I read this, I naturally felt Jason had picked me as an example. More than likely it's a composite of a bunch of different people all in similar circumstances. Regardless, it's a profile that could very well fit me. Afterall, a little over 3 years ago I was unemployed, it only took us a couple weeks to get the first version of Movable Type out and I posted religiously to dollarshort.org and movabletype.org.

Continue reading 'I take the bait'...

Most of you who are doing heavy web development work have told us that you're using Firefox as your browser of choice, and if so, there's a few absolutely indispensable extensions that we'd recommend adding to your toolkit. (If you're not familiar with installing or using extensions, the Mozilla foundation has documentation available.)

First, for anyone who uses the web interface of their blogging tool or edits text online for any application, the resizeable textarea extension will let you size text entry boxes to whatever dimensions you prefer.

Once you're set up for resizing text areas, there's a suite of astoundingly powerful tools available for web developers, particularly those who work with CSS, Javascript, and the DOM. Chris Pederick's web developer extension is a whole suite of functions that make quick work of common tasks like validating content and display information about page elements, while including powerful options like the ability to edit the CSS of a page with live updating of the page's display.

A new and powerful partner to this toolbar's functionality is the Aardvark Firefox Extension. A slick set of functions that let you highlight page elements in realtime just by hovering, and to change the formatting and display of the page to simplify debugging, Aardvark's as fun to play with as it is useful.

As soon as you've gotten a taste for the power of extensions, you'll want to start building some yourself. The easiest way to get started is with Greasemonkey. Greasemonkey is an extension that lets you add user scripts to any page you visit, giving you the full power of DHTML that automatically executes when you visit any page. The Greasemonkey User Scripts wiki details the dozens of user scripts available. A good one to get started with is Gina Trapani's Movable Type upload directory script, which we'd mentioned in the past here on the Professional Network blog.

If you're making user scripts but want to simplify installation for users who might not have Greasemonkey installed, check out Adrian Holovaty's new Greasemonkey compiler, which makes a true Firefox extension out of a Greasemonkey user script, simplifying the user experience for Firefox users.

And finally, if you want to dig in and start creating Firefox extensions yourself, you can check out this tutorial detailing exactly how to get started.

Whether you're just making creative use of extensions, creating your own user scripts, or building new extensions on your own, we'd be glad to hear about your ideas. Get in touch and we'll share your ideas with the rest of the Professional Network.

Over on LiveJournal news, Brad's announced two cool new features. The first is in-page comment management, which savvy geeks will see is powered by some nifty AJAX wizardry.

The second announcement is of interest to a lot of Professional Network members as well. LiveJournal now supports Nokia's LifeBlog application, which means the Atom API extensions needed for LifeBlog have been added, as documented in the previous ProNet posts on LifeBlog, and the core Atom API support in LiveJournal has been revamped as well.

Professional Network member Jedd Haas of EPS, Inc just let us know that the relaunch of the College of Pastoral Supervision and Psychotherapy site has just gone live.

In addition to being a clean and attractive use of Movable Type to publish a general site that doesn't look like a traditional weblog, the new site meets the goals the client laid out for the project: "The site would need to be constructed where content, not design, could be easily updated without the assistance of a professional Webmaster."

Jedd found out about the project through a listing on the Professional Network mailing list, and was able to contact CPSP, reach an agreement about the project, build out the site, and launch the new design in just a few weeks' time. Congratulations to CPSP on the new site, and to EPS for a successful launch.

Online Journalism Review has an interesting look at a topic that's not frequently discussed: How professional bloggers are paid.

From large blog publishing networks like About.com, Gawker Media, and Corante to individual professional bloggers making a living on their own sites, there's a wide variety of compensation plans being used, based on everything from site traffic to number of posts, and this article does a good job of covering not just the methods of determining pay, but also covers some of the ethical issues that can arise.

The IETF has just put out its last call, a key milestone on the road to The Atom Syndication Format becoming an official standard.

If you've given the Working Group your feedback on the current draft, you might want to check out Steve Jenson's atomfeed Python library or if you're working in Perl, you might want to check out our own Mark Paschal's Atom::Filter, which makes it easy to manipulate Atom feeds at the command line.

O'Reilly Media has just launched a great new blog called O'Reilly Radar, where the popular publisher covers the latest trends that inform the publications and conferences that O'Reilly is known for.

There's a lot of cool new features that have been built into the Movable Type-powered site. As the credits page shows, Professional Network member Tim Appnel helped create a slick folksonomy system for the new site, taking the popular technique of using tags to label content and building some clever extensions on top of it:

One of the interesting aspects of our work on the Radar project was developing the necessary infrastructure for implementing a content folksonomy in MT. In addition to the tagging and indexing of content similar to del.icio.us bookmarks, we developed a means of producing tag visualization layouts in MT's templates. Like Flickr tag size indicates its volume, but we also added a gradient feature to indicate what Rael called its "entropy" -- a measure of its most recent use.

Congratulations to the entire team on the launch, and we'll be watching the Radar with interest to see what's coming up.

Bluefly, the popular online clothing retailer, has just launched Flypaper, a cool new Movable Type-powered blog. Besides having great content, it's a good example of a Professional Network success story, as Cameron Barrett got the project lead through his membership in ProNet.

We're regularly updating the Professional Network mailing list and the members-only blog with new leads for members. If you want to join, you can read the member benefits overview or just sign up now.

Chad Everett's another popular Movable Type plugin developer who's considering the cost not just of developing plugins, but in supporting them as well. In a thoughtful post on his blog, where he says, "Add all that time together, and the development of the plugin is definitely not the great consumer of time. It's what I'll call the 'support' of the plugin."

One of the reasons we've been encouraging the ecosystem of services and support around plugins to grow (whether paid or free) is the increasing recognition that Movable Type's professional user base is willing to pay for quality code and support. In many cases, the paid commercial use of a plugin or application can let a developer afford to make a free personal version of the application available, in much the same way as Movable Type itself.

Whether a developer's work is supported by a day job, consulting work, or charging for the plugin or code that they've created, the more support that developers get to focus on their work, the better tools and technologies we all get to work with.

Just as an update to yesterday's post about Brad Fitzpatrick presenting at the MySQL Users Conference, Brad's posted his slides in PowerPoint and PDF format.

Just another one of the many little fixes in Movable Type 3.16 that should help ProNet members keep their sanity: The configuration settings documentation now covers every setting that you can modify in your mt.cfg file.

Thanks to John Gruber and Phil Ringnalda for the reminder to document all these options.

Jay Kerr's posted a quick overview of the Yorkminster Park Baptist Church site which JAK Media has redesigned over the past 10 months. It's a classic makeover, moving the old site to a new presentation that's valid XHTML and CSS. But the overall effect and its impact is especially dramatic when compared to the old church site.

We've just launched Movable Type 3.16, which we previewed to Professional Network members on the email list and members-only blog last week. We've heard a lot of good feedback from you about Movable Type since the launch of the Professional Network a few months ago, and this release addresses many of your requests.

The focus for Movable Type 3.16 is on code quality and cleaning up little issues and bugs that have crept into the code base, either in the past year or, in some cases, since Movable Type was first released.

To get started, you can get Movable Type now, or log in to your account to upgrade. Or, read on to find out more details.

A solid, high-quality platform

First, above all you've told us that you want a solid, predictable and reliable platform. As plugin developers and professionals working on weblog deployment we want to make sure you have the most reliable platform possible. With the significant platform changes made in Movable Type with the 3.0 release and the addition of large new areas of functionality with dynamic publishing and subcategories in version 3.1, we've added a lot of new features. With the release of 3.16, we're working to make sure all that functionality is as reliable as possible.

Blog once, run everywhere

Second, you told us that you deploy Movable Type in multiple environments, ranging from test deployments on localhost on your laptop, to staging on workgroup servers running IIS, to production environments on LAMP. Movable Type's support for multiple operating systems, databases and web servers, adds up to well over 8,000 possible supported configurations.

With all those variables in mind, we've made a concerted effort to make sure the platform runs well everywhere. Windows admins will find that configuration URLs for plugins work correctly now, Atom and XML-RPC endpoints work better on Windows, plugin developers won't have to write convoluted code to handle Windows servers properly, and more features work identically regardless of where you're deploying. And with all the focus being given to SQLite these days, we've made our SQLite support a first-class peer to other databases for those who are not able, or don't want, to run a full database server.

Movable Type 3.16 includes the a new version of the nofollow plugin by default, with a newly-added configuration screen which allows you to disable the plugin or exercise more control over how links are modified.

The nofollow plugin is being released with a Perl Artistic license so that you can make improvements to it or use it as a base for your own plugin development work. Several of our best practices recommendations for plugins are demonstrated in this plugin, and we'll be expanding our documentation to show you how to work from this base for your own work.

Better reliability

The 3.16 release of the Movable Type platform makes a significant number of security enhancements and improvements to the core of the application, marking this as a highly recommended update for Movable Type installations. In addition, improvements to internationalization support make it easier to post in the application regardless of your language of choice. And improvements to the TypeKey implementation solve many of the user experience issues faced by commenters on Movable Type-powered sites.

In addition to these fixes, we've added more than a hundred more tweaks, updates, and fixes to the platform, all of which make it easier to count on Movable Type for your needs as a weblog professional.

In short, we're recommitting to code quality with this release, to reduce the number of .01 (or .001) bug fix versions of Movable Type which you have to deal with. This should be a welcome change for web hosts and a great way to reduce hassles for everyone who maintains Movable Type installations.

More to come

This release positions Movable Type for the rapid evolution we're planning, allowing us to build and release our new features on a solid, stable platform. We'll also be accompanying the platform releases with improved documentation, additional guides like our Guide to Combating Comment Spam, and more information on building your career with blogs and Movable Type.

If you're attending the MySQL Users Conference in Santa Clara this week, you'll want to check out the presentation that our own Brad Fitzpatrick is giving tomorrow. He'll be covering a lot of lessons learned while building the LiveJournal community, and covering topics such as when to use the filesystem vs. when to use a database. You can read a full description of the presentation on the conference website.

Movable Type was originally built as a hobby, at a time when asking users to upgrade frequently was a fun part of participating in the blogging community, not a burden. At the time, there wasn't even an idea that blogging would become an industry.

In that environment, there were different expectations for the product. Commercial users were rare and most people who installed and used the product tended to be highly tech-oriented. Most people who have used Movable Type know its quirks and know how to work around them and there are little nagging issues that we, as early users and developers, have all grown to accept. Unfortunately, as a new generation of customers discover the platform, these idiosyncrasies become less endearing and more of a headache.

About five months ago, as the Movable Type team developed the roadmap for future versions of the product, they also evaluated Movable Type and its core code. A decision was made that, before we added the features on the roadmap, we first needed to step back to address and fix the issues (bugs and oddities) that we already knew about. The community has provided, through bug reports and feedback, a great springboard for this. But we also did something new for the first time — we decided to invest in something more than public beta tests: we hired a professional quality assurance team to discover new bugs.

For the past couple months, the two teams have been discovering and fixing bugs, making performance enhancements and working on making the Movable Type code base even more robust, stable and secure than before.

In retrospect, in our desire to get 3.0 and 3.1 out to market, we lost track of our commitment to quality. We learned through this process that shiny features aren't worth a damn unless they work well. With Movable Type 3.16, we believe that we're getting back to the quality of code that our users had grown to expect. Even though it's just a point release, I believe it's a turning point for Movable Type as a professional product.

This release alone fixes over 100 known issues, quirks and bugs — these have been documented thoroughly in our change log. These aren't only issues introduced in 3.0, however. The QA team managed to find — and we addressed — quirks and bugs that have floated around in the product since nearly day one. It's remarkable what a team with a new perspective on the product can discover.

More details about this all can be found in this post on the Movable Type site.

We are pleased to announce the release of Movable Type 3.16. This release includes over 100 significant improvements to application security, usability and reliability across the thousands of environments that Movable Type supports.

We put Movable Type to work for ourselves to run our internal weblogs and corporate website, so we understand our customers' needs first hand -- from power users who use Movable Type to run their personal weblogs, to small businesses and Fortune 50's who rely on it for both internal and external business processes. This release is important to us and we are committed to ensuring a high-quality, reliable product that runs optimally across all of our supported environments.

You can read all the specifics about the release on the Movable Type News blog and our Professional Network overview covers details for the developer community on ProNet.

The Movable Type team has been very busy and we have a number of exciting enhancements on the roadmap for 2005. Stay tuned!

The entries for the 2005 LiveJournal Style Contest have been posted, and votes are now being taken. Go pick your favorites and help someone in the LJ design community win some cool prizes.

For everyone who has been asking for Six Apart, Movable Type and TypePad gear, we’re launching the Six Shop. Just in time for longer days and warmer weather, we’ve got hats and t-shirts from American Apparel, and some other nifty doodads.

In the future we will be adding more fun items. If you have any ideas, please send us your suggestions.

Just a quick post to say that we've launched the Six Shop, a fun little place to buy shirts, hats and whatever we can think of making. My personal favorites are the Ladies Rebuilding T-Shirt and the Ladies Wrench T-Shirt. Warning: these run small, so it's best to buy a size larger if you're interested in adding one of these shirts to your wardrobe.

Yeah, and there are men's shirts too.

Boeing's Vice President of Marketing, Randy Baseler, has just announced the relaunch of the "Randy's Journal" blog. Acknowledging some of the feedback, including harsh criticism, that the blog has received in the past, the new site addresses the critiques and notes improvements to the site without being dogmatic about what constitutes a "real" blog.

In relaunching with Movable Type, the site acknowledges requests for features such as permalinks and XML feeds while reaching, as the BBS blog describes it, balance between giving the blogosphere the proper respect and your business goals. It's a good demonstration that a corporate blog should reflect the culture of the organization it represents, and that a weblog can evolve and grow along with the company and its message.

Since anything worth doing on the web is worth doing with Ajax, Joe D'Andrea's written up his technique for using Ajax with TypeKey. It's a clean and simple implementation of the authentication service, and it's found a good home on the Everything TypeKey site as well.

François Nonnenmacher has written up a cool description of how to use Movable Type to gather feedback online, complete with screenshots of his work in action.

There are a number of applications for this sort of tool, but it seems like a particularly strong fit for organizations that have deployed Movable Type on an intranet who want to collect all of their feedback in one place.

We'd noted recently that GeoURL had relaunched, and if you're still hungry for more blog-mapping fun, you'll want to check out feedmap, which has a clean RESTful API and looks like a good basis for building location-aware blog applications.

A quick note if you've built applications or services that connect to TypePad or TypeKey: You'll want to bookmark the Six Apart Status Weblog, where we'll post updates about service status and scheduled downtime.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has just published a new guide on How to Blog Safely. Covering topics like anonymity, workplace concerns, and simple common sense, it's a great reference for those who want to be careful about blogging.

MediaPost has a detailed look at what they're calling "consumer generated media", including blogs. There's a good explanation of audiences and current business models, including quotes from BlogAds' Henry Copeland and PaidContent's Rafat Ali.

perl.org has just launched Perl NOC, a new weblog talking about the progress the perl.org team is making on its various projects.

The best new discovery courtesy of the blog is the new perldoc site, which features a nifty widget on the right side of the page letting you add labels to each man page.

Gawker Media's just launched Sploid, a new tabloid-style news site. Like all of Gawker's sites, it's powered by Movable Type, but the part that caught our eye was the truly distinct design style. In combination with the tone of the headlines, the ALL SHOUTING, ALL THE TIME style is a big departure for a major professional blog launch, and will hopefully inspire some more creative directions for high-profile sites to come. As the folks at 37signals have said, big is in.

Our own Ginevra here at Six Apart has taken the lead of being the organizer of the San Francisco Movable Meetup. While the Meetup remains independent to Six Apart (not an officially sponsored event), we wanted to make sure that people here inside the company had a casual way to meetup with the community once a month.

The Meetup may be labeled "Movable Type," but TypePad, LiveJournal and Six Apart fans are more than welcome to attend. Check out the meetup page and sign up today!.

One of the benefits of Movable Type's support for multiple databases is that it makes it possible to add creative new functionality to the platform. Gregory Williams has just announced a new version of MT-Redland, an object driver which adds support for the Redland RDF storage mechanism to Movable Type.

The new storage system lets you perform some really flexible and creative new types of information retrieval, as Gregory's screenshots demonstrate.

Macromedia's XML News Aggregator is one of the most popular resources for people who build on top of Macromedia platforms, collecting their broad community into one web-wide conversation. The MXNA team has just launched a comprehensive revamp of the site, and the new effort looks great.

The presentation is vastly improved, it's easier than ever to find the posts you're interested in, and the new "Smart Categories" let you track topics regardless of who's posted about them. Congratulations to the MXNA team on the relaunch, and if you're contributing to the community, be sure to submit your feed for consideration for the aggregator.

We've just announced that Adobe is supporting our weblog template tags in the new version of Adobe GoLive CS2, and we wanted to explain in a bit more depth to ProNet members what motivated the effort to create these new tools, as well as some ways to make use of the new capabilities.

Many of you who work with these platforms have told us you wanted to be able to work with visual tools to lay out your templates, or to use more efficient tools to do your hand coding, and the new version of GoLive makes it possible to do exactly that. The included tags cover all of the built-in template tags supported by Movable Type and TypePad Pro's advanced templates, letting you focus on your content and presentation instead of remembering the details of individual tags.

GoLive CS2, if you're not already familiar with it, has a very powerful set of tools for working with all web technologies, ranging from CSS to Favicons. Now you can add in template design to the tools at your disposal.

In addition, a significant number of you told us you work with other parts of the Creative Suite, and GoLive integrates well with all of the other Adobe tools, making it possible to more easily move your creations through tools like Photoshop and Illustrator and into your weblog.

We'll be working to extend support for easier design of weblog templates in the future, and keeping our ears open for your feedback.

We're excited to note today's announcement that Adobe has added support in the new version of Adobe GoLive CS2 for Movable Type and TypePad template tags. Our goal was to make it easier for weblog creators and designers to use the Adobe tools that many of you are already familiar with, while introducing the Adobe Creative Suite audience to the power, flexibility, and creativity of publishing with TypePad and Movable Type.

We're sure that our community of designers and bloggers is going to put these new tools to creative use. If you're ready to get started, there are more details on what's possible in our Professional Network post, and we can't wait to see what you come up with.

Note: This essay by Jeffrey Veen originally appeared on the Adaptive Path website. We're able to reprint it here by kind permission of Jeff and Adaptive Path, who've published the essay under a Creative Commons license.

Jeff strongly advocates that content management projects fail not because of technology but because organizations don't accommodate the human factors that make a project successful. Though we make tools like Movable Type, we definitely agree that addressing human needs is the biggest challenge, so we wanted to share this piece with our audience.

So many of the companies I’ve spoken to lately have complained about the content on their Web sites. They say it’s woefully out of date, growing out of control, and generally a complete mess. Almost unanimously, these companies have chosen to solve the problem by handing it to their IT departments.

“Find a way to manage content,” they demand, “and don’t break the bank doing it!” Companies swallow the enterprise software pitch of decentralization. They think that by distributing content creation they’re empowering business units to manage their own areas of the site. They do this hoping that the units can satisfy audience needs without requesting IT help for every little site change.

The CMS Myth

The idea is enticing. Empowered departments of a big enterprise, all publishing content directly to their customers through standard templates. The site continues to grow, but in a controlled way. And these business units have complete control of what is and isn’t online.

Sounds good, but just try putting it into practice. In a report published last year, Jupiter Research uncovered some startling findings. “Of just under 100 companies … only 27 percent of companies surveyed planned to continue using their Web content management systems as they do now.”

So why do these CMS projects almost always fail?

People Problems

I’ve spoken to a number of Web teams that have used a CMS with varying levels of success. One problem I heard repeatedly was that the project worked fine, but nobody used the software once it was available. I call this the Stupid User Argument, and it’s a favorite of IT departments. The techies did their jobs, after all: They diligently gathered requirements, scoped out the solution, carefully selected a vendor, and managed the project to a mostly on-time and on-budget conclusion.

So how come nobody actually uses these systems once they’re in place? The answer is easy: People don’t like to change the way they work, particularly knowledge workers.

Knowledge workers spend years building strategies to accomplish their jobs, practices that likely date back to study skills acquired during their education. So changing those processes — no matter how valid the provided technical solution — is nearly impossible. Users will rebel, even after substantial training.

To have any chance of success, a content management project must follow the same user-centered design practices as any other project. Task analysis, rapid prototyping, usability testing — all of these methods are crucial to a CMS rollout. It’s foolhardy to unveil a mammoth, nine-month project to an unsuspecting user community and expect adoption.

But there is a larger issue at play. Even the most thoughtful projects may be misguided. Over and over I’ve heard the same complaint about these projects, “Turns out, after all the budget and time we spent, we really didn’t need a content management system at all. We just needed some editors.”

Editorial Process

Content management is not a technology problem. If you’re having trouble managing the content on your Web site, it’s because you have an editorial process problem. Your public-facing Web site is a publication. Treat it like one.

If you’re not in the business of producing publications, you won’t be able to do better by plugging in a technology and crossing your fingers. Rather, solve the problem with people. Here’s why:

• All publications require editorial expertise. Few companies are publishing companies; most provide other kinds of goods and services. Yet over the last few years, every company has found that it must build and maintain what is essentially a constantly updated publication: a corporate Web site. Publishing is a skill set that most organizations have never needed, but one that’s integral to producing a quality site.
• To succeed, you must separate content and process from software. Serving a Web site is a technology issue, so IT should manage it, right? Wrong. Would you let the printing press operator be involved in your editorial process? Of course not.
• Put editors in charge. You need an editorial staff in place to make the content on your site as interesting and consistent as it can be. That staff may just be one executive editor, but nothing should go online without that person’s approval. As your Web strategy grows, so too should that staff.

How It Works

Set up a process something like this: An editor manages all content on the site. Give that editor a staff of writers to send out into your business units. These writers act like reporters in the field, working on stories that they submit to a copy desk.

The stories are then compared against editorial and corporate style guides, producing consistent, professional content. That content goes to your legal and marketing departments for approval if necessary. Only then does it go online.

Once you have a proven and smooth editorial process in place, and have a strong team managing that content, you can start to think about making them more efficient with technology. Outline your process, sit down with CMS vendors and say, “Look, here are the steps that we have in place to create and maintain our content. Here are the tools we use to do our jobs. None of this is going to change. Can you help us be more efficient and effective?”

You’re running the conversation, not them. Ignore their pitches for fantastic new features; those are just frosting. You need to get things done, and they need to prove their expensive software can do it.

A Sound Strategy

This is more than just a way to manage content, it’s the beginning of a content strategy — a plan for how your site will respond to your customers, inform them, and help them make decisions that will ultimately increase their loyalty to you and your site.

And frankly, I could not care less what system you use to publish it.

Note: This essay by Jeffrey Veen originally appeared on the Adaptive Path website. We're able to reprint it here by kind permission of Jeff and Adaptive Path, who've published the essay under a Creative Commons license.

Jeff strongly advocates that content management projects fail not because of technology but because organizations don't accommodate the human factors that make a project successful. Though we make tools like Movable Type, we definitely agree that addressing human needs is the biggest challenge, so we wanted to share this piece with our audience.

So many of the companies I’ve spoken to lately have complained about the content on their Web sites. They say it’s woefully out of date, growing out of control, and generally a complete mess. Almost unanimously, these companies have chosen to solve the problem by handing it to their IT departments.

“Find a way to manage content,” they demand, “and don’t break the bank doing it!” Companies swallow the enterprise software pitch of decentralization. They think that by distributing content creation they’re empowering business units to manage their own areas of the site. They do this hoping that the units can satisfy audience needs without requesting IT help for every little site change.

The CMS Myth

The idea is enticing. Empowered departments of a big enterprise, all publishing content directly to their customers through standard templates. The site continues to grow, but in a controlled way. And these business units have complete control of what is and isn’t online.

Sounds good, but just try putting it into practice. In a report published last year, Jupiter Research uncovered some startling findings. “Of just under 100 companies … only 27 percent of companies surveyed planned to continue using their Web content management systems as they do now.”

So why do these CMS projects almost always fail?

People Problems

I’ve spoken to a number of Web teams that have used a CMS with varying levels of success. One problem I heard repeatedly was that the project worked fine, but nobody used the software once it was available. I call this the Stupid User Argument, and it’s a favorite of IT departments. The techies did their jobs, after all: They diligently gathered requirements, scoped out the solution, carefully selected a vendor, and managed the project to a mostly on-time and on-budget conclusion.

So how come nobody actually uses these systems once they’re in place? The answer is easy: People don’t like to change the way they work, particularly knowledge workers.

Knowledge workers spend years building strategies to accomplish their jobs, practices that likely date back to study skills acquired during their education. So changing those processes — no matter how valid the provided technical solution — is nearly impossible. Users will rebel, even after substantial training.

To have any chance of success, a content management project must follow the same user-centered design practices as any other project. Task analysis, rapid prototyping, usability testing — all of these methods are crucial to a CMS rollout. It’s foolhardy to unveil a mammoth, nine-month project to an unsuspecting user community and expect adoption.

But there is a larger issue at play. Even the most thoughtful projects may be misguided. Over and over I’ve heard the same complaint about these projects, “Turns out, after all the budget and time we spent, we really didn’t need a content management system at all. We just needed some editors.”

Editorial Process

Content management is not a technology problem. If you’re having trouble managing the content on your Web site, it’s because you have an editorial process problem. Your public-facing Web site is a publication. Treat it like one.

If you’re not in the business of producing publications, you won’t be able to do better by plugging in a technology and crossing your fingers. Rather, solve the problem with people. Here’s why:

• All publications require editorial expertise. Few companies are publishing companies; most provide other kinds of goods and services. Yet over the last few years, every company has found that it must build and maintain what is essentially a constantly updated publication: a corporate Web site. Publishing is a skill set that most organizations have never needed, but one that’s integral to producing a quality site.
• To succeed, you must separate content and process from software. Serving a Web site is a technology issue, so IT should manage it, right? Wrong. Would you let the printing press operator be involved in your editorial process? Of course not.
• Put editors in charge. You need an editorial staff in place to make the content on your site as interesting and consistent as it can be. That staff may just be one executive editor, but nothing should go online without that person’s approval. As your Web strategy grows, so too should that staff.

How It Works

Set up a process something like this: An editor manages all content on the site. Give that editor a staff of writers to send out into your business units. These writers act like reporters in the field, working on stories that they submit to a copy desk.

The stories are then compared against editorial and corporate style guides, producing consistent, professional content. That content goes to your legal and marketing departments for approval if necessary. Only then does it go online.

Once you have a proven and smooth editorial process in place, and have a strong team managing that content, you can start to think about making them more efficient with technology. Outline your process, sit down with CMS vendors and say, “Look, here are the steps that we have in place to create and maintain our content. Here are the tools we use to do our jobs. None of this is going to change. Can you help us be more efficient and effective?”

You’re running the conversation, not them. Ignore their pitches for fantastic new features; those are just frosting. You need to get things done, and they need to prove their expensive software can do it.

A Sound Strategy

This is more than just a way to manage content, it’s the beginning of a content strategy — a plan for how your site will respond to your customers, inform them, and help them make decisions that will ultimately increase their loyalty to you and your site.

And frankly, I could not care less what system you use to publish it.

There's one week left if you want to enter the LiveJournal 2005 Style Contest. If you're familiar with LiveJournal's S2 style language or want to learn it, now you've got a good incentive to get started. There's the chance to win a 1GB iPod shuffle, a $150 gift certificate from ThinkGeek, and the opportunity to potentially get your designs in front of millions of people in the LiveJournal community.

Still looking for some numbers and statistics to use when talking about weblogs? A couple of new resources have just popped up. Perseus has just released The Blogging Iceberg, which mentions the following key points:

When you say "blog" most people think of the most popular weblogs, which are often updated multiple times a day and which by definition have tens of thousands of daily readers. These make up the tip of a very deep iceberg: prominently visible, but not characteristic of the iceberg as a whole.

What is below the water line are the literally millions of blogs that are rarely pointed to by others, since they are only of interest to the family, friends, fellow students and co-workers of their teenage and 20-something bloggers. Think of them as blogs for nanoaudiences.

Nanoaudiences are the logical outcome of continued growth in blogs.

The other piece, released just today, is the Intelliseek/Edelman white paper on blogs. You'll need to register to download the PDF-formatted white paper.

A key point from the Inteliseek/Edelman paper:

Bloggers are speaking and being heard in real time, and only recently has the marketing community begun to grasp bloggers’ impact on brands, business and issues. Because of their speed, bloggers can and do alter the volume and tone of any conversation. Gone are the days of waiting months to get reliable feedback on an initiative. The new reality is this: any blog author with a passion for what you're selling knows what you're doing the minute you do it -- and maybe even before. Bloggers comment immediately, and marketing and business professionals can quickly lose control of the conversation.

Tim Bray reviews some important reasons Why We Need Atom Now, with the good news that the Atom Publishing Format is nearly complete and important pieces like an Internet-Draft of the Atom Publishing Protocol (Basic) are rapidly maturing. Just as importantly, there's increasing adoption of the API, with new interfaces such as the BlogMarks API being built on top of the Atom API.

One of the most interesting new sites to launch recently is Consumerpedia.org, which is being billed as a Wikipedia-style site for people who are looking for purchasing information or consumer resources.

Though it's still early in the site's development and a lot of content is yet to be created, the TypePad-powered Consumerpedia Blog is doing a good job of documenting progress.

For example, clarifying that the site's purpose is "not just about products, but anything that users want to comment about - companies, organization, charities, services, whatever" has already helped early visitors to better understand the site's purpose. It's a good demonstration of how having a blog accompany the launch of a web site or service can streamline communications and reduce confusion.

PC World's Andrew Brandt went to work tracking down a comment spammer, following a link from a single piece of comment spam blocked from their Movable Type-powered blog, and discovering a watned criminal.

Like the work Ann Elisabeth is doing over on Spam Huntress, PCWorld's research shows more and more web spam is coming from organized criminal efforts.

I just had to link to TeeveePad since it's been providing the office with some good April 1st laughs this morning. Nothing much to say here other than good job and check it out.