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.