The Pros and Cons of Content Management Systems

I read an interesting article a few days ago by Johnathan where he examines the dark side of content management systems – CMS for short. His arguments focuses mainly on the markup and the aesthetics of the site. Once the site is live and you’ve provided the client with the ability of changing content, images and copying and pasting from Word, then one must face the fact that it’s now out of your hands and God knows what the site will end up looking like.

I’ve been developing websites for over 5 years now and find it amazing how everyone now seems to want a CMS. Additionally with the use of WordPress, I no longer desire to create static websites. The issue that I have with CMS is that damn “copying and pasting” and I put 100% of the blame on Microsoft. Super bloggers and geeks aside, most people I know use Word to write their content and rely on it for formatting and spell checking. Unfortunately when it comes to incorporating it in WordPress, copying and pasting leads to strange formatting which ends up ruining the aesthetic of the site and adding extra code.

We’ve been working with Vertical Bridge, an HR consulting and Recruitment company for over 4 years now. In that period of time, I’ve seen this company grow, transform and prosper. As a result we built them a static website, then a website with an XML based career section and more recently we revamped the site and incorporated the entire site into WordPress. Our biggest reason to do the switch was to take advantage of RSS feeds for the career section. Since Vertical Bridge provides job opportunities in various industry sectors, providing RSS feeds for each of these seemed like a great added value. Additionally, jobs can be indexed by Google which was not the case with the XML based website.

Transforming the Vertical Bridge website into WordPress was easy enough. The templates were created based on the design provided by Ideastream Design, pages were created for the static section of the site and posts were used for the blog as well as for the careers. I would have been more than happy to simply use the standard posts for the job posts, but Tzaddi, always wanting to find a better solution, did some digging and came across Flutter by Freshout.

This plugin proved to be amazing. With just a few minor adjustments, we now have an admin feature which allows us to select the industry, specify the location, salary, status, job type and insert descriptions, requirements and additional comments.

I must admit that Tzaddi’s find did prove to be quite impressive. This plugin is simply superb. Except of course for the editing areas. Unlike for blog posts, the flutter plugin only provides a visual editor (click on thumbnail for larger picture) and so copying and pasting from Word leads to disastrous results. The only solution that I could find was to let my clients know that when working with Word, it would be best to transfer the content to notepad and then copy and paste from there. I’m not sure what other solution there is. The WordPress forum has resulted in no replies whatsoever and none of the additional plugins have solved this problem.

Anyone out there have any suggestions?