The perfect wine to drink while looking for a new CMS (Photo: quinn.anya)

Over the last few years I’ve had the opportunity to be involved in major web relaunch and content management (CMS) projects. In addition, I spent a lot of time listening to the woes of colleagues in other organizations, exchanging experiences and discussing ideas how to select the best CMS.

Over the next couple of months I’m planning to write a document (maybe just a PDF, maybe an e-book) that could help NGOs, non-profits and international organizations to select web content management systems as part of a web relaunch.

The document will not focus on individual systems, but rather on a method how to define your needs and then select a system, as well as the most common pitfalls, such as the perils of content migration or integrating your CMS with you design.

If you have experience with CMS selection/implementation and are interested in contributing to the guide, I would love to hear from you.

Please use the comment section below or the contact form to get in touch with me.

Related posts:

1. YouTube’s new guide for non-profit organizations
2. How to prepare your non-profit page for Facebook Timelines
3. A call for investing into information management in aidwork

Anyhow, this project gives me the rather enviable opportunity to create something from scratch without having to worry about integrating any other systems or databases. And of course, in my mind I have played the “what if”-game many times. Now is my chance to put it into practice.

The conditions

• Website must be easy to maintain
• Must have a backend
• Must have a backend in a language that can be used by the people maintaining it
• Multilingual support
• Cheap
• Site should be up as quickly as possible
• Big developer community

With all that in mind I suggested to use WordPress as a CMS to drive the website. The National Society accepted this proposal and I have been fine tuning it since then. It’s running on a dedicated virtual server. For the design we decided to modify a premium theme.

Below is the set-up that I have in place so far. Please chip in, if you have any additional suggestions. I hope others will find it useful as well. All plug-ins can be downloaded from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

• After the deadline
  Checks spelling, style and grammar of your English language posts.
  
• Category header content
  Let’s you add HTML at the top of your category or tag-pages. In my opinion, you shouldn’t need a plugin to do that, but it’s the only way I found to add custom text to the top of category or tag-pages.
  
• Contact Form 7
  A customizable contact form. Supports many languages.
  
• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
  Generates a human readable sitemap.
  
• Easily navigate pages on dashboard
  The site will have a lot of pages (as opposed to posts). This plugin makes it easier to jump to individual pages.
  
• Google XML Sitemaps
  Adds a Google XML site map.
  
• Lightview Plus
  Improves the standard WordPress gallery and has slide show features. I have not figured out how to make this multi lingual yet. The plugin requires that you buy  the lightview script for 3 euros.
  
• Media Tags
  Allows you to assign tags to your media files which will make it easier to find them in the future.
  
• Registered Users only
  Hides the site from anonymous users while still under development.
  
• Sociable
  Adds Twitter/Facebook etc. “share” buttons to all posts and pages. I love how customizable this plugin is!
  
• WP DB backup
  Emails me a complete database backup every day. The frequency is customizable, as are the tables that are being backed up.
  
• WPML multilingual CMS
  This plugin is seriously impressive! WPML does not only create a multilingual structure for your site but also helps your editors with the translation workflow and even supports translations of widgets and text-strings (though that doesn’t always work 100%). Since my day job is to maintain a multilingual site I can tell you that I’d be much happier if we had this!   The plugin was developed by a translation company that integrates their translation services into the plugin. Very smart.
  
• WPtouch iPhone theme
  Delivers site news for mobile devices (not just iPhones). Since the site is for a disaster-prone country where mobile phone are widely used, this could be a useful feature.

I am still looking for a good comments-plugin that is available in multiple languages. Please leave a comment if you know one.

Update 17 may 2012: In light of a recent successful hack of this blog I’d like to make two security-related additions:

• Simple Login Lockdown
  After five unsuccessful login attempts, it blocks the IP address of the person trying to log in for a certain time (default is one hour)

• Sucuri Security
  Sucuri is a  service first and plugin second. For 90 USD per year, Sucuri monitors your site to make sure that nobody is making changes without your knowledge and cleans up your site if it has been infected with malware. The nice thing is, that you can even sign up if your site has already been infected. Their service also includes a plugin that helps you to close some WordPress vulnerabilities and blocks IP addresses which are known to be the source of comment spam. While Sucuri costs money, I found that it’s definitely worth it. 

What would you add to this list?

Related posts:

1. How to prepare your non-profit page for Facebook Timelines

Lesson learned: Don’t split the contracts for the design-part and the technical implementation!

If I could go back in time and do one thing differently, this would be it.

Don’t get me wrong: I love the CMS we bought, I think the design company has done a great job and I think the company that is implementing the CMS is also doing their part wonderfully.

However, I totally underestimated the amount of time and coordination needed on our side for the design company and the implementation partner to work together effectively.

Even though both partners have been trying to do their best to overcome all problems, we still lost a lot of time, energy and ultimately some money because the process was much more difficult, than if it had all been done by the same company.

Different interpretations

The main problem was that the two companies frequently had very different interpretations and expectations regarding what each side’s responsibilities were.

Sometimes, when A heard that B was going to do X, there were very different definitions of X. And in the end, we as a client were stuck in the middle. This is not the fault of either party, it’s just one of the things that happen. Or maybe it’s our fault for not spending more time on defining exactly what each little thing means. Then again, if you wanna define every little detail then you will spend a year writing the contract.

However, my point is that if both design and technical implementation were done by the same company, then this wouldn’t even be an issue. In that case we could simply say “We don’t care who inside your company is responsible for this detail. It is your responsibility.”

The original rationale – find the best for each part

The original decision to give each part of the project to a different partner sounded good at that time:

We wanted to find the best design company independently from their technical skills and the best technical solution independently from their design skills. And while it should be possible to implement any (not too extravagant) design in any modern CMS, it would have been extremely helpful for everyone if the design company had been familiar with the product.

Thus, the next time I’m doing this kind of project, I’ll make sure to get it all from one source.

Have you had similar experiences when relaunching existing or creating new websites?

Related posts:

1. My new project: “How to choose a content management system – the non-profit guide”

What I like about it is that Rebecca Leaman doesn’t focus on the cool and trendy but on the workhorses that help to run any organization. Here is her list of categories:

• Accounting, Time-Tracking, Invoicing, Billing
• Fundraising Software, Online Payments, Donor Management
• Mailing List Management, Email Marketing, Newsletters
• Events Management, Registration, Scheduling
• Membership Management, Contact Management (CRM)
• Discussion Forums, Online Communities
• Website Builders, Blogs, Content Management (CMS)
• Website Analytics, Data Collection, Tracking Tools
• All-In-One Solutions for Non-Profits

Many of the products are US-focused which might make some parts of the list – I’m thinking of the fundraising tools in particular – unsuitable for nonprofits outside the United States. But I found many of my favourites in the list and definitely recommend bookmarlking it. You might not need this list this week or even this year – but next the time you are cursing <that software> you might want to go back to that list and see whether there isn’t a better alternative.

Related posts:

1. Online training: Tech Tools for Emergency Management
2. Posts worth reading: from social media ROI to digital storytelling
3. Completely wrong assumptions about technology in developing countries