Weekend Presentation: Phil Hawksworth Can Smell Your CMS
videos

Weekend Presentation: Phil Hawksworth Can Smell Your CMS

on Mar 16th 2013 with 16 comments

Just because you didn’t get to go to that awesome conference, it doesn’t mean you have to miss out! Take a break this weekend and learn from the entertaining Phil Hawksworth as he questions the damage which Content Management Systems do to the front end of the web.

The Video

This was recorded at the Fronteers Conference, during October 2012 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Links

Tags: cmsVideos
 
Enjoyed this Post?

Subscribe to our RSS Feed, Follow us on Twitter or simply recommend us to friends and colleagues!

By

Rollover to read this author's bio or click through to see a full list of posts by this author.

Hi there! My name's Ian Yates. Welcome to Webdesigntuts+ :)  

Plus Premium
 
 
Note: Want to add some source code? Type <pre><code> before it and </code></pre> after it. Find out more
  • http://twitter.com/garethdaine Gareth Daine

    Great talk. I particularly took note during the part about WYSIWYG editors. I’m currently building a CRM/CMS using CodeIgniter that will require an editor of sorts but I’d like to keep things simple to avoid the issues mentioned. What do you think would be the best solution?

    • ianyates

      Hi Gareth, I think the best person to listen to on this subject is Rachel Andrew. She’s very outspoken on the topic of handing WYSIWYG control over to clients (take a look at this article, for example http://enva.to/ZCYkL6).

      Her CMS (Perch http://enva.to/ZCYy4M) uses markitup by default (http://enva.to/146m0wX) which is a robust, yet limiting WYSIWYG editor. Definitely worth a try I reckon. Good luck with the build!

      • http://twitter.com/garethdaine Gareth Daine

        Excellent! Thanks Ian. I’ll certainly be looking over these shortly.

        I’ve used Perch before and it’s quite a cool little CMS. I’m going to have a look at markitup now. Cheers.

      • http://twitter.com/garethdaine Gareth Daine

        Yup, looks ideal. I like the browser support too. I’m going to try this out. Thanks.

      • Anthony McLin

        MarkItUp misses the point for what clients need. Clients hire you because they don’t fully understand HTML. Forcing an HTML editor (even one as basic as MarkItUp) is a disservice. Instead, deliver a WYSIWYG editor, but with all the unnecessary options stripped out. Make sure to provide only the styles you want them to use (most editors let you provide a custom CSS file to list these) and disable all the strikethrough, underline, superscript, 3 image inserters, 2 link inserters, tables, etc.

        And furthermore, in areas where design markup is important, break it into multiple fields. Separate headers from body text fields, and make headers plain-text only. Don’t just give the client one massive WYSIWYG field for the whole page, break it down into the required sections and elements necessary to preserve the design and layout.

      • http://twitter.com/philhawksworth Phil Hawksworth

        Ian,

        I agree. Rachel Andrew has some excellent talks on this topic and has some great insights from her work on Perch. I like her presentation from SmashingConf last year:

        http://www.rachelandrew.co.uk/presentations/future-of-cms

        Brad Frost did a nice summary of her talk too:

        http://bradfrostweb.com/blog/post/the-future-of-content-management-rachel-andrew-at-smashing-conference/

    • Héctor Laura

      A solution could be the use of HTML templates inside the WYSIWYG editor. Thereby, user only has to focus on content. But sometimes, users like to feel “creatives”…

      • http://twitter.com/garethdaine Gareth Daine

        Thanks Hector. I’ve certainly been considering templates but again, I don’t want to be too restrictive and there is a chance that the way content is presented will change week by week, so it may be too limiting.

        • http://twitter.com/philhawksworth Phil Hawksworth

          Gareth,

          I think that an important point is that often the users who are creating content are not designers (even though they like to tinker with design and feel creative, as you mentioned). The danger here is that systems can sometimes “give users the power to ruin their site”, as Rachel Andrew puts it.

          Constraints can sometimes be enablers since they force users to observe the designed content strategy and conventions. With large flexibility comes an inevitable attrition of the design and conventions over time. I like the suggestion below from Anthony, where he talks about avoiding large content blocks, and instead providing logical separate inputs for structured content.

  • Zaethrael

    I totally agree with him. I hate CMSs that doing that kinda stinky mess. When i develop site in worpress I waste hours (days!) to improve stinky code. That is the reason why we should redesign our thinking about looking & working. “Something working” is not enough becouse is not working optimal ! So I take codeigniter to database management and standard CRUD operation then after optimize this I am doomed to write everything from scratch. Every plugin & idea that client saw somewhere must be perfect for me also. Look at this comment – I see Large problem in source code. I LOVE idea of plain text formated for inputs. Primodial HTML is always the best idea so You have worshipper Phil !

    • Zaethrael

      Large problem means Large problem LOL ! We should create module global css file with all inline stinkers inside.

    • Zaethrael

      damn… Large

    • Zaethrael

      Large

    • Zaethrael

      [Large problem] Well i cant past stinky code – thats good xD

  • http://www.wpguru.com.au/ Robin Thebs

    The home page url was really loooong …The home page url was really loooong …

  • http://www.wpguru.com.au/ Robin Thebs

    The home page url was really loooong …