Homebrew CMS - Remember the Editor

We are always surprised by how many customers of high end content management systems actually refer to them as their "authoring environments". Why? Because faster, better and - ultimately - cheaper authoring for their web sites or intranets was the #1 reason they bought their CMS in the first place.

James Robertson, author of the CMS Requirements Toolkit, consultant and blogger reminds those assembling a home grown CMS to beware the perils of cutting corners on the authoring environment for your CMS:

Editing environment. If the authors can't easily and efficiently get their words onto the site, you're toast. There's a huge amount that goes into a good editing tool, including table support, CSS, images, spell checking, and clean cut-and-pasting from Word. Even if you chose to use one of the commercial editing tools (a good idea!), it still needs to be tightly integrated into the CMS.

All online editors are not the same despite first appearances. Building a robust, highly functional product is a lot of hard work and something we like to think we do well.