Summary

Selecting and using a CMS to provide CMS services to KFUPM clients has a become a challenge.

Reason why some candidates failed?

  • Although it has really good benefits, using it to create and delivery CMS sites is turned out to be a challenging and quite involved tasks. Especially because of the KFUPM team’s skill set.
  • Recent software upgrade, 3.1.12, of Crafter CMS is not supporting Debian OS.

Other candidates that were considered

  • It is .net based cms solution. It is paid solution with around 200k SAR of eight site licenses. Creating sites may be easier with this framework but the maintenance may become an issue for KFUPM team.

  • It is one of the most popular CMS built on Django. Content creator and UI focused. The heavy lifting is done by . Good support for inline editing of the content.

  • It is also one of the most popular in Django space, with rapidly increasing popularity. Developer centric, no inline editing support.

Wordpress or PHP based solution

  • These were not even considered because of security and maintenance reasons - these solutions require frequent and pro-active maintenance which KFUPM operation team does not do because of team size and skill set limitations.

Criteria to select a CMS

A CMS solution should be evaluated considering three types of users.

  1. Content creator
  2. Developer
  3. Operations

Content creator

It should be easier for the content creator to create and maintain content.

Developer

Easier for developer to create a CMS site, and to integrate enterprise services.

Operations

Easier for operations to maintain, upgrade and debug server issues.

In the content of KFUPM

We have already built a good based development, and Operations software services and infrastructure. Selecting a Django based CMS service will make it easier for KFUPM team to deliver CMS services.

A based CMS already satisfies two of the three aforementioned criterion.

Content creator criterion

vs

Although there are pro and cons of the both the solutions, either one of them can be selected for this criterion.

Why is better?

  1. It is built on top of Django without adding unnecessary complexity, unlike plugin based system of .
  2. It is clean and easier for the developers.
  3. It is headless CMS.