A caveat: I don't particularly like Word - I'd much rather use HomeSite or TextPad to write in. So my sickness out of the way:
People who build CMSes need to support the people supplying the content, not the other way around. In our case, that means we have to deal with the fact that all of our reporters and editors, who are writing primarily for our print publication, use Word. > > * No format restrictions. Users can do anything they like, > regardless of whether it can be published into the > required formats. > One could make that argument about almost any word processor, built into a CMS or not. In any case, you can do what we did: You set up your own styles and require users to use only them. Takes training, yes, but it can be done. That's what we've done and, on the whole, it works. > * Huge amounts of VBA coding is required to constrain > Word into something usable. True, although I'm not sure "huge amounts" is necessarily the case. Our current setup: A VBA script translates Word documents and our styles into simple XML for input into our CMS (this is for articles coming out of our print publication, which uses a Word/Quark system; "native" Web documents are done directly in the CMS with eWebEditPro). Is the script "hello world" short? No, but it's hardly "War and Peace" long, either. More important, it was written well enough that our programmer, who'd much rather be coding in Java, can go in and make changes when necessary. > > * No integration with the CMS. This is the big one. For > example, how do you link to another page within the > same site, using Word? True, Word itself doesn't provide CMS integration, but some CMSes do. Percussion Rhythmyx has what looks to be a very nice Word 2000 toolbar for this (we use Rhythmyx but haven't actually tried this yet because we're stuck on Word 97 for various reasons). I think Divine does as well. > > * Word is document-centric, not page-centric. This makes > it very hard to manage things like: the location of > the content in the site, classification, metadata, > and linking. True, but as above, can be solved by the CMS. > > * Using Word encourages users to think that it's OK > to publish a 50-page document as a kilometre-long > web page... > Bad users, bad! What's to prevent users from doing this with some other tool? You don't want kilometre-long Web pages, you need to train your users to break things up. Or you hire a copy desk to do it for them :-). Adam Gaffin Executive Editor, Network World Fusion [EMAIL PROTECTED] / (508) 490-6433 / http://www.nwfusion.com "I programmed my robotic dog to bite the guy who delivers the electronic mail." -- Kibo -- http://cms-list.org/ a wish for peace in the new year.
