Re: [cms-list] new to list/cm - What is CMS?????

[Michael Kowalski]

Well I'd more than just quibble with Emad's emphasis on "NOT pages".

Of course a CMS must separate content from presentation (or "page structure" if you like). But from a usability perspective, it is very often better not to make that separation too explicit in the authoring process. I've often seen editorial users frankly baffled by complex hierarchies of content elements that do not (in their view) naturally map to their website structure.

In many contexts, you can get the best of both worlds by offering WYSIWYG "page" authoring to editorial users and only separating out the content objects for reuse behind the scenes.

Even where workflow or other concerns make authoring of smaller elements desirable, these still have to be edited through some interface: you can treat this document as a "page" also, albeit not a publishable one.

We need to remember that CMS *users* are not interested in the theory of CMS: they have business problems to solve around authoring and managing content. We need to make that process as simple and intuitive as possible.

michael

--
http://cms-list.org/
more signal, less noise.