Now that I’ve gotten over the initial trauma of recounting the horrors of dealing with open source content management, I propose a solution: it’s time for us standards-aware, usability-obsessed developers to turn the tide on the glut of bloated, unusable CMS’s. Contact the developers, submit bug reports, or better yet, if you’re up to it, write your own systems. (Do something more than just pontificate from a weblog like I’m doing!)

Two Daniels (1,2) have suggested that I initiate a project, but I have no idea where to start. I do know that WordPress and Textpattern are already out there, filling the gap for usable open source weblog CMS; so now I want to put out a user-centered “portal” CMS which can do things as simple as a flat section-article structure, but also take community-oriented extensions like a user directory and an events calendar; something you could use for a church or an alumni association. (You can see where my project experience is coming from.) That’s a lot to handle for someone still struggling with basic MySQL syntax and user sessions. Baby steps, baby steps.

(While I have many complaints about Mambo and other open source systems, I must cite Mambo for this glimmer of promise: xMambo. News is that they’re integrating xMambo’s standards-based code into the Mambo core. Hopefully this involves fixing some of the screwy interface logic along the way.)

What happens when bloated, corporate-minded CMS themability meets user-unfriendly customization? The “Teamwork” Template: Your Slogan Here! How do you change the slogan? “It’s hard-coded into the template.”

And when the phpWebSite CMS finally does develop a “W3C” theme, its main advantage isn’t validation or standards: it’s the CSS Skin Switcher. Example here. Classic open source priorities at work: cool geeky stuff before basic usability.

Usability and design guru Jeff Veen is looking for a better open source content management system, after demoing the selection available at OpenSourceCMS.com: “What I experienced was obtuse and complex software that was packed with gratuitous features at the expense of usability and user experience.”

I share his frustration, having gone through Mambo, phpWS, Xoops, Geeklog, Siteframe, PHP Nuke, and PHPWCMS in my search for a decent CMS for AteneoDC. I can tell you firsthand: dealing with open source content management is bad for stress levels and blood pressure. Never more in my life than in the past two months, building AteneoDC.com, have I so often yelled “WHAT WHERE THESE PEOPLE THINKING?!?!?” at the screen, at the horrible navigational structures I was subjected to, at being made to leap through any number of hoops just to make categories and articles and populate a sidebar menu. None of the above-mentioned apps are capable of producing fully valid, standards-compliant output, and none of them can manage a page made out of simple, structural markup right out of the box. Nested tables, unquoted attributes, and ALLCAPS tags are embedded right into the code, and no amount of PHP-savvy custom templating can get rid of them. (Though there are hundreds of custom templates out there, each more bloated, gradiated, and graphics-heavy than the last.) And the URL structures, oh the mess of ampersands and strange query string variables!

I finally settled on Mambo as the least of all evils and the most extensible of the CMS’s out there, but it’s still mostly a pain to use. There’s the strange dichotomy between “components” (main content extensions) and “modules” (sidebar extensions). When writing articles (for which one must first make “Sections” and “Categories”) needs one to enter a “name” and a “title,” and the interface leaves it unstated as to which is used for what part of the site. But wait, there’s more.

Probably the two most annoying parts of the Mambo admin interface involve the top of the screen, where they’ve put (1) a huge javascript hover dropdown menu, and (2) the form submit buttons. Having the form submit buttons up there means that you have to fill out a form to the bottom, then scroll back up to hit Save. And if you’re not extra-careful with your mouse, a dropdown menu directly above it will, well, drop down, obscuring the Save button while you click madly about, trying to get rid of the menu. It’s even worse when you use tabbed browsing. Anything will bring up those menus. Anything. And they don’t work properly in Safari on OS X 10.2.

The forms also break the Enter key. You have to go up and click on Save, otherwise nothing happens. And Mambo can’t parse line breaks unless you use the WYSIWYG editor, which only works in IE on Windows. The “weblinks” component is not customizable. You have to hack /languages/english.php to edit the intro text and graphic.

And this was from Mambo, the best of the bunch.

I’m sorry. I just can’t go on. This happens everytime I try to do something with an open source CMS: I approach the fringes of a nervous breakdown. Dealing with misanthropic user interfaces is just too horrible.

<Sobbing>