Generic Content Management Isn’t Realistic

By Deane Barker • • 1 min read •
AI Summary

This post argues that generic content management systems fail to meet the diverse needs of different organizations. The author emphasizes that a tailored approach is essential for effective content management, highlighting the limitations of one-size-fits-all solutions in addressing specific business requirements.

Note

Looking back fom 2025: I re-read the linked article, and it’s an interesting perspective. Most days I disagree with it, given all the progress we’ve made, but some days, it resonates.

And shockingly, the main link still works, 19 years down the road.

As I work with content management more and more, I believe more and more in what this guy has written:

Perls of wisdom in a sea of site mismanagement

[…] site management system vendors are creating generic solutions that actually increase the cost of running a site […] the vendors’ ideal of a generic site-management system “is completely wrong”, Berk says. “The development overhead is very, very high – and for 90 percent of the problems, that’s too much overhead.”

It’s true – there is no one single bullet. As much as we all want a generic solution that will wrap itself around every site, it’s not going to happen.

Content management is a patchwork. Certain parts of a site may run from a purchased content management system, other parts may run from a custom app, still other parts may be generated from a WYSIWYG editor.

What sort of tools does Berk have in mind? Perl scripts, for instance. A tiny technical team armed with Perl scripts and an Oracle database ran the first sites he worked on back in the mid-1990s. Berk recalls his fascination as he saw larger and larger teams implementing more and more complex platforms in the late 1990s and early 2000s to achieve essentially the same result.

We mentioned a humor piece a few months ago that was SO true. Read it again, and understand that content management is not a perfect science. It’s whatever works for a particular problem. Trying to get it all under one, top-down umbrella, is just asking for pain and frustration.

Links from this – Enterprise Architecture: Top-Down Makes My Head Hurt April 8, 2003
My buddy Rob and I were talking the other day about top-down vs. bottom-up enterprise architectures. My last company attempted to implement a top-down architecture, where every system was planned out as to where it fit in the grand scheme and everything was on one big server under one language,...