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February 23, 2003
tiny cmsses
In his piece on Google buying Blogger, Winer points out that: "Today, the same software that Vignette sold a few years ago for millions of dollars, can be had for hundreds, and it's much easier to install and use."
So true. As I've said before, I think Vignette was among the most egregious of the bubble-criminals. They had no "product", just a team of smart engineers who tried to build something from the ground up for every client; it still managed to be a total rip-off. In my limited Vignette experience, they had no IAs (or anyone interested in information organization), no usability knowledge, no interaction design skills, and frankly no interest in any of those things. To use Jane Jacob's terms, they mistook a business' content for a problem in "disorganized complexity", when it was actually a case of "organized complexity" and thus not solvable by mathematical, statistical, or engineering tactics.
But there were one or two things, like support for complex polyheirarchies (and conceivably faceted structures) or workflow that sophisticated systems like Vignette had that cheap blog tools don't. I'm still waiting to see a fully operational CMS in daily use that has any kind of workflow support, but I'm willing to admit it would be useful.
The recent announcement of MT Pro happens to mention two features that really could pound another nail into the coffins of big CMS systems: support for category hierarchy and workflow. MT already allows posts to be placed in multiple categories; one of very few blog tools that I know does this. Adding heirarchy to this would allow the construction of very sophisticated faceted categorization schemes. Simple workflow support would mean that I my job as "editor" for the Berlin Guide would be simplified, for example.
Posted by Andrew at February 23, 2003 03:11 PM