Is it time to forgive out-of-the-box content management systems their past sins? Graeme Aymer presents the first in a series of business essentials.

Whether a website is corporate, governmental, publishing based, educational, or even charitable and non profit making, in many instances, without content management systems (CMS) it would be impossible for editors to upload current and timely content.

What's more contentious, however, is whether agencies should ever use a system that comes out-of-the-box. Traditionally these solutions have been guilty of generating regressive code, turning the developers silk purse of standards-compliant CSS/XHTML into a sow's ear of clunky tables and metatags.

And there have been plenty of usability issues too. "Many of the CMS products I've seen appear to have been designed by developers for developers, which is literally true for many of the Open-Source products," says Kitsite's Michael Kowalski.

But things are improving these days. Neil Lovell, Creative Director at interactive agency Cyber Media, discovered PaperThin's CommonSpot CMS some five years ago, "What CommonSpot had then that not many others did was inline editing," he explains, "So now you log in through the normal website and you edit the page you want. You can physically see it happening. It makes so much sense."

Proprietary vs Open-Source

More pressing is the proprietary vs Open-Source debate surrounding CMS. After all, Open-Source has no expensive licensing costs – it's "free". And ask anyone who has used PHP, Firefox or an Apache server whether Open-Source can deliver. Some remain unmoved, however. "We're not a big user of Open-Source systems just because the support for them, the ongoing development of them, is not as fixed or as stable," says Peter Barker, head of development at agency Rufus Leonard. This is also a business decision based on keeping his clients comfortable. Many are large blue-chips and would be ill at ease with an Open-Source CMS.

Many others use a mix depending on client needs. Cyber-Media uses Typ03 as well as CommonSpot, for instance.

It depends on budgets and feature sets. Open-Source's greatest benefit is it's free of licence restraints – server costs – associated with off-the-shelf packages.

Whilst that's undoubtedly true, one must also take into account that all systems - ready-built or Open-Source – need a certain amount of "bending" to be made to fit the project precisely. Open-Source can need that bit more tweaking, requiring staff particularly well versed in the technology involved. With ready made packages, this is still an issue, but less so: the vendor takes some responsibility. As Lovell points out: "The time it would take us to implement a CommonSpot site is far quicker than it would be to create one in Typ03."

The Software as a Service (SaaS) movement could potentially simplify CMS. Preserving the power of the "packaged" version, CMS as web services are more rented than licensed, and usually include hosting in the deal. There are a few around now but their quality is questionable. But this is about to change. Rufus Leonard's Peter Barker is particularly excited about Goss Interactive's iCM Freedom product, which works precisely according to this model. Starting at £300 per month for the most basic solution, it promises, with hosting included the same functionality of its iCM Enterprise, which starts at roughly £10,000 to licence its most basic feature set.

"It just seems like we've been waiting for someone to come out with a product like this that was decent," says Barker. "The guys from Goss came in and gave us a demo while it was still in development and we thought that would be perfect, particularly for our smaller clients, where they are not looking to make a big capital outlay. They may be limited on budget , or they're not exactly sure how their site's going to develop in the future."

Creative CMS

London's Kitsite is also entering the fray with its soon to launch, web based product PostCMS, designed specifically for designers. "We're supplying them with a CMS service that they can graft onto a site after they've designed it –ie. Design the site with whatever tools they're comfortable with, and then port it to PostCMS," says Kowalski. "Later they can add on more technical features, such as tagging, search, blogs, etc, as they need them."

When it comes to the rights and wrongs of CMS, it is impossible to say that one is better than the other. It's a matter of your in-house expertise and, more importantly, what your client wants. But one things for certain, off-the-shelf packages are coming on in leaps and bounds. It wouldn't be quite appropriate to say that CMS is undergoing a Carol Vorderman-like makeover, but the whole field is getting more interesting.