What is a Content Management System (CMS)?

A CMS is a software system used for content management. This includes computer files, image media, audio files, electronic documents and web content.

We are a specialist web consultancy seeking companies or organizations that require our expertise and experience with the following:

• customized Content Management Systems for web
• Zope / Plone / Python programming
• CMS hosting

We been working with the web since 1995 and have been using Zope and Zope-based Content Management Systems (including Plone) exclusively since 1999. Inquiries are welcome from both local and international customers. References from our previous customers are available upon request.

CMS Development

Understandably, our service offerings are centred around Content Management Systems. You can find much more details about CMS's and our CMS development platform of choice, Plone, elsewhere on this site. Please take a look at this page to see whether it might be worthwhile having a chat to us.

Our rate for typical CMS development projects is AUD$85-120 per hour (currently US$65-90/hr) depending on the size, complexity and urgency of your project. For larger projects, we can provide a detailed quotation for your project, including an all-inclusive price, once we have discussed some of the parameters of your project with you - so feel free to contact us to discuss your CMS development needs, be they large or small.

Zope/Plone/Python Programming

While customized CMS solutions based on Plone are our forte, we have even more experience with the underlying application server Zope and can therefore also offer you following Zope-related services:

• customized Zope Python Product development
• Zope site setup and administration
• Zope server setup and systems integration

Zope/Plone Hosting

We offer our customers fully-managed hosting for their customized CMS solutions. Based on the particular requirements of your site (i.e. traffic, site size and complexity, budget), we can offer you either shared or dedicated hosting for your site/s. Our servers reside in a top-tier facility in the USA. Prices for hosting are available upon application - feel free to contact us to further discuss your Zope and Plone hosting needs, as part of your customized CMS solution.

Open Source CMS products?

Available CMS products have, up until recently, been prohibitively expensive for smaller, medium or public organizations. However, open source CMS products have been rapidly closing the gap and in some respects, surpassed, their commercial competitors in terms of their capabilities, extensibility and scalability. By virtue of zero capital costs, Open Source CMS's have significantly improved the economic accessibility of CMS products in general. Having access to the source code promotes the continuous community effort of improving the core CMS product and at the same time allows for greater and easier customization of the CMS product to particular situations. As a result of these factors (and many others not listed here), Open Source appears to us to be a better fit for smaller to medium size organizations requiring content management capabilities.

Plone - a leading Open Source CMS

We believe Plone to be the best open source CMS available and as such we specialize in it. We are happily not alone in this assessment - recently (March 2004) E-Week magazine recently gave Plone an Analysts Choice Award (http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1557819,00.asp).

We based our choice not only on Plone's significant power "out of the box" but also for the following additional reasons:

1. Plone is very flexible, extensible and customizable
2. Plone is built on top of a very powerful open source application server (Zope), which is itself written in Python (a very powerful and flexible open source scripting language)
3. Plone's user community is large, diverse and vibrant
4. Plone is web standards-compliant
5. Plone is, in our opinion, the leading Open Source CMS product currently available

coming soon

What is a CMS ?

Content Management Systems provide a customized infrastructure to manage the often complex process of the development and delivery of content for publication. CMS's often include the following :

• customized content types
• customized content workflows (e.g. editorial review process)
• content transformation (i.e. write once, publish in many formats)
• a fine-grained permissions model (i.e. who can see and do what)
• templates (i.e. a way to control "look and feel")
• transaction "stack" (i.e. a record of every change that was made to your content, who made it, and a way to "roll back" the changes)

These capabilities are particularly required by websites that have large or growing collections of content and/or might also have multiple content providers with varying levels of technical ability (including those who don’t know HTML). As your website grows in size or complexity, at some point you will find that tools such as FrontPage, Dreamweaver or Notepad aren’t sufficient to manage your site - that’s one indication that you might need to implement a CMS. Some other indicators follow .....

When do you need a CMS

If any or several of the following questions are true then you or your organization might need a CMS:

• Is your website too large for you or your web team to manage via your current approach?
• As manager of your website, are you overwhelmed by updates to your website?
• Are you or your content providers overwhelmed by web authoring products or technologies?
• Would you like an automated way for your content providers to submit content to you for review, approval and subsequent publication?
• Would you like to carefully control the contextual and role-based permissions of your content providers, editors and designers?
• Does your website require dynamic content that has a limited lifetime, automated publication and archiving and other features that are not provided by your existing website?
• Would you like to separate the design from the content of your site, so that the two can be changed independently?
• Are you having difficulties maintaining a consistent look-and-feel throughout your website?
• Would you like an "Undo" button so that all changes to your website are reversible?
• Would you like to write your content once, and then potentially publish it to multiple formats? (e.g. text, PDF, XML)

What is a "CMS architect" ?

We work with you or your organization’s web team to provide you with a Content Management System customized to your particular requirements. We will first examine your entire website’s content (be it text, images, video or other media types) and then we will provide you with more efficient processes and tools to publish that content to your website. The CMS we provide for you will allow you to delegate the management of different parts of your site, and it will also widen the pool of potential content providers to your site by significantly lowering the technical skill level required to contribute to the site. We will optionally implement customized content types and workflows to allow you to most efficiently manage your website/s.