Not too long ago I had a chat with a graphic designer who told me about that amazingly easy to use CMS that will leave all developers sooner or later unemployed but I did not feel that threatend to try it out until recently that I needed to come up with a solution for a models agency website that required only a few pages to be frequently updated, consisting mainly of text and images. I thought to try that miraculous thing, whose name reminded me of Sushi, that allows non developers to offer CMS solutions to their clients just out of curiosity and because I found it totally uneccessary to install a big full-on CMS or write a bespoke one.  By nature I am not easily convinced that things are as great as they sound, and in every case I try to discover imperfections and disadvantages so I make my life a bit harder than it deserves to be. However, in the case of CushyCMS, I was taken by great suprise and started being worried about graphic designers taking over the whole world being able to offer complete web sites with both great looking front-ends and functional back-end solutions.

The big advantage of Cushy is that it is very fast to set up as it only requires registration (which is free), rather than any sort of installation. It is ideal for small web sites that users want to update text and images in some parts of their site e.g. news, events or even the homepage. The only thing the designer has to do is to provide the FTP details of the site, specify which parts and pages will be editable and who is going to edit those. Cushy will then create the WYSIWYG editors and the CMS is up and running! I have never come across any CMS that can do the job so quickly, absolutely stunning!

Unless your client has a big site with lots of different content types, it is not really worth installing one of the big CMSs such as Joomla or Drupal. But even if this is the case, you would be better off developing a proprietary CMS that does exactly what your client’s requirements are, rather than install an all-in-one solution that will result in unnecessary server processing, slow response times, let aside bugs that are very hard to find and fix given that those applications have been written by so many different people using totally different coding styles.

Wordpress is getting more and more popular as a CMS lately apart from being an excellent blog platform. It is much more light-weight and clean compared to Joomla and Drupal and with the recent release of the Pods framework it can easily(?) turn into a powerful CMS. What is great about Pods is that you can create and display your own content types, and even build relationships between them, unlike Cushy, which make it really powerful while at the same time it retains all the Wordpress advantages: simplicity, SEO benefits, excellent plugins that increase functionality without having to tweak the actual code (normally). No wonder Wordpress won for the first time the ‘Best Overall  Open source CMS’ award in the 2009 Open Source CMS awards.

You need to bear in mind though, that Pods is made for developers who are familiar with PHP.  For non developers, there are a few alternatives s that can help significantly turning Wordpress into a CMS but with some limitations. The most interesting ones are:

• Custom fields built in functionality – assign custom fields to a post (requires editing templates / php files).
• More fields plugin – add extra (custom) fields in the write/edit page – more powerful than custom fields.
• WP-CMS Post control plugin – control your admin write options and hide unwanted items from content authors.

There’s many other interesting light-weight open source CMSs for small websites many developers claim they are easy to use and set up such as XOOPS, concrete5, SkyBlueCanvas, Perch and MODx. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the chance to try them yet but once I do I will write another post about them.

I have recently switched to the Mac world after having spent about 15 years working exclusively with PCs with all sorts of Windows OS, from 3.11 and Windows 95 up to Windows Vista, which in my opinion is the worst  OS Microsoft ever came up with. I have always been reluctant about the switchover, although many people around me were enjoying their time working with a Mac while I was struggling getting rid of viruses, malware, trojans, worms, updating corrupted system files, spending hours in forums trying to learn from other people who were getting the same error message(s), running registry and hard drive defragmentations or when nothing of all that would work, getting to many people’s biggest nightmare: back up all the files (using linux), format the drive and reinstall windows, install the drivers for all the devices, re-install all the programs I needed and so on…

During those 15 years I have spent days and days of work trying to resurrect a windows machine without loosing any data or at least using as less as I possibly could. I can’t recall the times friends of mine were phoning me up, being desperate as their PC was displaying blue screens of death, or would not start up just hours or days before an important meeting or deadline. Some casual pc users have even got into the world of metaphysics in order to make their computers boot again, by talking to them as if they were their kids and try to make peace with them again so the would start up. From my experience, 80%-90% of the time I had to resolve a pc issue, the problem was software-related and not a hardware one.

And then one day I came to the big realisation that the main argument of all pc users that pcs are far cheaper than macs, is not  true at all! The problem is that people generally consider up-front costs instead of the long-term ones. However, looking at the long-term ones macs work out cheaper than PCs and this is why:

• Macs do not suffer from viruses, trojans, worms etc as much as windows-based machines do, so there is no additional cost for anti-viruses, anti-malware, firewalls etc.

• Macs do not suffer from overtime hard drive fragmentations, so users do not need to purchase any kind of tune-up utilities.

• Macs do not use any sort of registry for their applications so users do not need to spend any money on registry cleaning and defragmentation tools. There is no deterioration overtime that windows users accept as indispensable and ‘normal’.

• Macs OS X is very stable, rarely hangs or freezes and there is no need to re-install it ever, unless the hard drive breaks down.

• It is unlikely you will lose data, which many PC users take for granted, no matter how long you use your computer.

• On a Mac you will save hours and hours of work, by not having to deal with how you could make your computer perform as it used to be when you first bought it, or trying to get rid of a virus or recovering from a system failure etc. All those hours are worth some money too…

In a way, Microsoft has offered work indirectly to many IT people because of their poor OSs but the questions is whether this was deliberate or not. Would all those 3d party applications and tools (such as antiviruses and system enhancement utilities ) exist if their OS did not have so many weaknesses? Also, wouldn’t it be great if all those IT experts would dedicate their time in more creative and challenging activities rather than wasting their time trying to resove a widnows system failure? Macs simply do what any computer should do: they just work! Therefore, in the long term, owing a Mac rather than a PC is a much better investment, worth the higher up-front cost as macs also have a higher resale value.

By no means I claim that Macs are flawless; they aren’t. But there are some very strong  arguments about their quality, performance and stability that cannot be overlooked. There is no wonder most web professionals use Macs, rather than windows-based machines. However, casual computer users could benefit too, if they overcome the myth that Macs are far more expensive.