Brian Rosenthal's Weblog

Well, prompted by Alan Runyan, co-author of Plone, we’ve been thinking a lot recently about Content Management lately.

Because E-commerce is more about content management than we originally thought.

If you take a look at some of the most successful e-commerce sites, you’ll find a lot of “content” (wine.com, proactive.com, etc.).

As much as these sites showcase a product catalog, they are far more about a lifestyle brand, and to effectively communicate that message, a company must have an easy-to-use content management system.

So, Robocommerce needs a content management system.

Well, we already have one. Our current strategy is to allow users to edit content via an ftp-style interface (Using WinSCP), where they have permissions over their content directory. That works fine for editing the site, but the approach has a few glaring gaps:

1. It does not support “properties".
2. It does not support sort order.
3. It doe not support titles for content.
4. It does not support content re-use.
5. It does not support an end-user triggering a commit into our version control system.

It’s strengths are:
1. It supports contextual editing (through a separate interface).
2. It leverages the file system.

In a future posting, I’ll outline the direction that we’re headed.