Depending upon your needs and budget, an enterprise content management may be out of your reach financially but also be overkill. There are many smaller, less expensive options for content management. But did you ever consider a blogging platform as your content management system?
There are several blogging platforms on the market today that advertise themselves as content management systems. One of these is Movable Type. To understand how this blogging platform can behave as a content management system let’s take a look at some of it's capabilities from a content management perspective.
What is MT?Movable Type is an open source blogging platform. But more recently it's been seen as just more than a tool to create blog websites. They even promote their ability to create true content management based websites.
What features do the software provide that would make you believe you could use it for your complete web site?
- Out of the Box Templates/Themes: MT has a number of out of the box templates for page creation that include blogs as well as a number of predefined themes. Themes provide the look and feel for your website. Themes are customizable to match your company’s colors and logo branding. Web Page templates are built using XML, HTML and CSS and can be customized as well.
- Rich Text Editor: You can easily create content using a rich text editor that provides the ability to easily create content formatted the way you want (WYSIWYG), but also allows you to add video, images, audio and other files into your content.
- Asset and File Management: MT provides the ability to upload different types of rich media assets including images, video, audio and word documents and management them from a central location. You can then use these to include in your content (upload once, use anywhere).
- Static and Dynamic Publishing: Movable Type allows you to have a combination of both static content pages and dynamically created pages. This ability means that you can support large expected loads of traffic to your site.
- Customizable Roles/Permissions: As an administrator you can create any number of roles within your website and assign permissions to them. Then you add specific users to these roles. This enables you to support a large number of content contributors without the pain of managing each one’s permissions individually. In addition, there are a number of out of the box predefined roles that you can customize.
- Search: The latest version of MT provides built-in search functionality with a customizable search page. Alternately you can integrate a third-party search solution with your MT website.
- Categories/Sub-Categories/Tagging: Most content management systems allow you to create any number of categories and subcategories and assign content to them. MT also enables you to assign your content to any number of categories. You can also create automatic archives based on categories. Archiving abilities is another key feature of content management.
- Integration with MS Word: One of the most requested capabilities these days is the ability to create content in MS Word instead of having to learn to use a content management authoring tool. MT does provide this ability through its extensive API.
- Personalization: Create a number of visitor profiles and then customize your website for each of these profiles.
- Security: MT uses OpenID, the current industry standard for authentication on the internet. You can build your own registration and authentication using OpenID or you can integrate a third party solution through integration with OpenID.
Other Capabilities
Movable Type has a number of add-on components to help you create a fully functionality website, including forums, blogs (of course), and other community type solutions.
You can provide any number of RSS feeds based on tags, categories, pages, searches, etc… allowing people to easily subscribe and stay in touch with updates to your system.
Versions of Movable TypeThere are three different versions of MT. Depending on which one you decide to use the options are different.
- Hosted solution: This is the basic version of Movable Type called TypePad. It's a free hosted solution and while good for blogging, not really recommended for a content managed website
- Open Source Version: The open source version is the same as the solution you can buy without some of the extra add-ons (like the Community Server). This version is yours to download and install where you like.
- Professional Version: This version contains the most functionality for a true content managed website. You pay to get this solution and it you get lots of support and updates as a result.
This is a high level view of how Movable Type enables you to create more than a blogging site. You can use it to create very functionality websites with most of the functionality required for most websites on th small to medium scale.
So before you think you need to spend a lot of money on an enterprise system or even a-range content management solution, look at a blogging platform like Movable Type. The price is right and the functionalty may be just what the doctor ordered.
