What You Need to Know When Choosing your CMS It's time to stop burying all that content you just spent weeks on in the knowledge coffin that is your CMS. We have to rethink and redefine what "Content Management System" means. Is its purpose just to manage your content? No. The truth is that all major CMS systems are proficient at managing content. The real question is this: Can your CMS bring life to customers and the community at large? Leslie Camacho, CEO of EllisLab, will join us at PU to look behind the code and reveal what makes a CMS effective, efficient, and right for your business. No more dirt naps. Let's let our content live.

1. Avoiding the
Knowledge Coffin
What you need to know when choosing a CMS

2. Leslie Camacho
CEO, EllisLab

3. Father

4. Husband

5. Nerd

6. I translate Nerd to help
you be more successful.

7. Today we will discover
• How to help your customers be successful
• How to help your dev team be more
successful
• How to save a lot of money

8. This will help you
choose a CMS. I
promise.

9. Also, there will be
homework. Sorry.*
*Nerds are never sorry about sharing information.

10. What is a CMS?
Content Management System

11. A CMS serves content
in a way that makes your
customers successful.

12. A modern CMS
embraces COPE.
Create Once Publish Everywhere

13. COPE Primer
Google “NPR COPE”

14. The #1 mistake when choosing
a CMS is not understanding
how your content helps people
succeed.

15. Lack of Customer
Empathy creates a
Knowledge Coffin.

16. Customer Empathy,
How?
• Don’t skimp on the “discovery” process.
• Eat your own dog food.
• Ask your customers.
• A good team/agency will demand you do all
three.

17. Believe that you make
life better.

18. End goal is a “Success Guide”
that explains how you help
customers succeed in plain
english.

19. Success Guide Tips
• Use simple language
• Describe the process from the customer’s
view point.
• Describe the end result from the
customer’s viewpoint.

20. Turn Success Guide
into Creative &
Technical Requirements

21. Learn to Translate Nerd

22. Empathize with your
“Makers”
Creative, Technical, and Editorial People

23. Read Hackers and
Painters by Paul Graham.
Google “Hackers and Painters”

24. Read The Nerd
Handbook
Google “The Nerd Handbook” by Rands in Repose

25. You promised to save
me money. Get to it
already.

26. Empathy creates a
shared language.

27. Use the Success Guide to
help your Makers empathize
with your customers.

28. End result is a Creative &
Technical requirements
guide that tells you what
your Makers need to make
your Customers successful.

29. All software has a
philosophy that governs its
development.

30. CMS Success Tree
• Your customers
• Your “editorial” team
• Your “Maker” (creative & technical) team
• In that order.

31. The Actual Search

32. Research, establish empathy
with providers using your
requirements as a starting
point.

33. Know your strengths and
weaknesses so you know what
type of support you’ll need.

34. Build something with the
finalists, even if its just a simple
web page.You need to use it.

35. Map your results back
to the CMS Success
Tree

36. Four Obstacles
• “Holy Wars”
• Feature Comparisons are misleading
• Non-empathic party makes actual decision
(budget, IT, whoever).
• Security

37. ExpressionEngine

38. Contact
http://EllisLab.com
Leslie.Camacho@EllisLab.com
@knight777