Choosing a CMS for a charity project, social enterprise, or public sector/corporate site can be a real trial. There are so many great CMSs in the opensource marketplace, yet when we build sites the we are often faced with a choice of the top three to choose from. This is no different from the web manager/comms team staff in an orgnaisation who wind up with the same choices. Do I choose Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal? Frequently we choose Joomla as it does 80%+ of what we want and with a few extra extensions you can get to 90%. But what about that 10%?

The 10% Joomla, Wordpress, or Drupal cannot do is gonna hurt someone somewhere.

It's this last 10% that becomes a potential problem for the client and the agency. This is not an empirical fact but a rough rule of thumb based on our experience. We think it breaks down like this:

CORE Functionality	80%
Extra plugins [free/commerical]	10%
Coding/Development Work	10%

Your main CMS whether its Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal will probably cover 80% of what you need. The last 20% you can split into two lots of 10%. 10% of the additional functionality can be delivered by adding modules/widgets or extensions to the core CMS. This might give you a feature rich form builder, a specialised Flickr slideshow/picture gallery, or in Drupal or Joomla's case full blown apps that can over a whole suite of functionality like membership management or mailing list management.These may be free or commerical add ons.

But what happens when that last 10% rears its head? How the hell did it get there? Where does that last 10% come from? Do you really need to solve that last 10% and who pays for it? For a web agency that offers solutions this 10% can ruin the profit on a project. For the client it can be the extra expense that wasn't budgeted for and the start of some difficult conversations about budgets and specifications. Somewhere that 10% is gonna cost someone. Lets start with where it comes from.

Where does the 10% come from?

That last painful 10% of functionality you need to squeeze from your CMS can come from various sources:

• client changes their mind mid project about what is required [we all love them]
• agency has not scoped fully enough the initial requirements [the afraid to say no scenario]
• changes in technology in the course of the project means you need to do more work [eg Twitter change their authentication methods]
• the plugin / add on ( the amber 10%) solves only half the problem and needs customising to meet the brief

 

In our next article we'll deal with some ideas on solving this, avoiding it, and killing it. 

want2donate.org is an affiliate website which targets audiences who want to donate to charity. The site benefits various UK charity partners by acting as a conduit for potential donors and supporters to reach different kinds of non-profits across the sector.

Most large UK charities particpate in affiliate programmes in order to drive new supporters and donations. Many well-known charities are listed on the site such as WWF, Oxfam, ActionAid, World Vision, WSPA, National Trust, Cancer Research UK and many more.

This plugin for Joomla lets you specify specific email recipients when some one has submitted a K2 content item in the frontend. It is GPL Licenced and free to download. There is no support with this plugin.

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Kicking off a campaign to coincide with the 10 year anniversary of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, No Women No Peace was an express project delivery with highly individual design and functionality.The campiagn starts with a competition - which is where we are now at the time of writing - them moves on to full blown invitation to action. So this site had to be ready to change to a campaign site with all its associated functionality once the competition had finished and it moves into phase 2.