When choosing the best content management system for your project, it is important to weigh both the technical and non-technical pros and cons. Both technical and non-technical reasons can ultimately affect the bottom line cost. Therefore, it is not recommended to simply choose a content management system based solely on technical language or feature set. In this article, we will take a look at an open source content management system called Radiant CMS.

Radiant is a Ruby on Rails based solution that works with a variety of databases. It has a few years of development and a couple noteworthy deployments. There are technical and non-technical reasons why Radiant CMS is a good choice for a content management system.

Technical Reasons to Choose Radiant CMS: It's Ruby on Rails based which can speed development by taking advantage of the convention over configuration paradigm. In addition, the Radiant code base has excellent automated coverage in unit tests. This means the code is well tested and robust. Unit test code coverage can be one aspect to measure when considering open source content management systems. In fact, we could suggest the amount of code covered by automated unit and integration tests should be considered when choosing any open source library and/or framework. It is an easy indicator to measure and compare. But, that is an entirely different conversation.

Radiant CMS also has an excellent extension system. This allows customizations required by your project to be made. When choosing a content management system, the ability to add and maintain any customizations should be an important factor. This point should be considered not only from the beginning, but how your customizations will evolve as upgrades and enhancements occur within your chosen content management system. In other words, if the core CMS is modified to provide the custom functionality, how can upgrades or patches from the core CMS developers be applied to your modified version. Radiant's extension system provides this separation of concern.

The Radius tagging system of Radiant is fantastic for adding dynamic functionality. It is nice that tags can be added directly to page content rather than some kind of comment or special character sequence in order to indicate non-static content.

Non-Technical Reasons to Choose Radiant CMS: Radiant has an elegant, intuitive administrative interface. It is not intimidating to the non-technical user. In fact, the design encourages people to embrace using the system, because they assume it is going to be easy to pick up and learn.

The lack of workflow functionality can be considered a feature in many cases. In competing CMS products, workflow can seem like an attractive feature at first, but is often hindrance to configure and work around for projects which require only a few administrators of content.

An additional, non-technical reason to choose Radiant CMS is cost. The project is open source and the community of ruby on rails developers and ruby on rails hosting providers is growing, so your cost risk of obtaining these resources is minimized.

Conclusion

From a technical perspective, the open source, Ruby on Rails based Radiant CMS makes an excellent choice. From a non-technical perspective, Radiant CMS makes an excellent choice as well. When combining both perspectives, we have had many positive project experiences and deployments using Radiant over the past year and a half.

In layman language Web 2.0 means the second generation of web development. The first generation web development is considered to be the great dot-com bubble of late 90's and the rupture of which around late 2001 triggered ubiquitous reactions that the Web was over hyped. Concept of second generation of Web development started after a media conference between O'Reilly and MediaLive International. In this brainstorming session it was realized that the web has thrown up more interesting applications and Web technology has emerged more important that ever and the word Web 2.0 was coined. Web 2.0 is a business revolution making a bent towards the web as a platform. Web 2.0 doesn't have a definite boundary and there are several things encompassing a core. Web 2.0 is visualized as principles and collection of numerous sites running on those principles at some distance from the core.

Since then Web 2.0 has remained a top level discussion for proper definition and boundary that is yet to be reached. One can simply say blogs, social bookmarking, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds, and lightweight business over a single platform. Web is no more one way, now uploading, and downloading of information happens simultaneously, sharing and distributing contents across networks leveraging the power of "Long Tail".

Web 2.o includes numerous practices. Here are some typically implemented practices by websites:

• Well-off internet applications based on Flex or Ajax.
• This intend to allow information intended for end-users, such as contact information, calendar events, geographic coordinates, content life, social relationships etc
• Presentation is separated from content through Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
• High-end APIs (Application programming interfaces).
• Content Syndication through RSS or Atom.
• Facility for content creation through users, also by machines from client side or server side.

Content Syndication: Syndicating partial or whole content through standard protocols such as RSS, Atom, and RDF by using XML so as to be used by the end-users for their need.

Some misconceptions on Web 2.0:

• Curvy designs (This curvy structures became widely popular at the same time, designers also started making more websites with this cool looking styles)
• Use of Ajax or Flex (Which happens to come in the same time of Web 2.0, No doubt that websites with web 2.0 architecture needs these to work well.)

Web 2.0 is not an alien to criticism and had its fair share. Here are some criticisms leveled at Web 2.0

• Web 2.0 is not a new version of World Wide Web at all. It merely uses the technologies and architectures of Web 1.0.
• Ajax is not substituting the HTML protocol; it's an additional layer over HTML.
• Blogs or social networking was features of Amazon.com since 1995 when the word called Web 2.0 dint exist. It's way more than only blogs and social networking.

Here's an analogy for you. Yesterday, I was working my butt off in the gym on the cardio machines, panting wildly with sweat dripping off me and my face as red as a beet. Not the most attractive sight, but I figure, you're at the gym to work out right? I might as well "go hard" or "go home", as they say.

As I looked around me, I could see all these people simply going through the motions. There they were, minus perspiration in their shiny new lycra and expensive gym shoes, casually walking on the treadmill or lazily turning the wheels on a bike while reading a book or glued to the TV screens in front of them. Only a few seemed to be there for the actual purpose of working out. The rest seemed to be there to check out the talent or to simply keep up the appearance of fitness, while doing the bare minimum.

Huh? I don't get it. Why have these gym bimbos paid so much money for a gym membership and all the related gear if they aren't going to take full advantage of their investment?

Then it struck me - these gymbos were just like those companies who spend thousands of dollars on a shiny new website with all the bells and whistles like graphic design, blogs, shopping carts, web analytics, the lot and then fail to take advantage of it. I see it so often, regardless of company size. Web sites that could easily be bringing in loads of traffic and revenue simply wasting away because nobody can be bothered tracking visitor activity, analyzing trends or checking for search engine compatibility and usability.

These companies are simply keeping up appearances, investing heavily in Internet technology because their competitors are doing the same. But no thought has gone into the search engine compatibility of the site, how usable it is for visitors or whether it meets accessibility guidelines. They don't look at their site statistics, they don't check for broken links and they sure as heck don't investigate why their sites aren't converting traffic into customers. What a waste!

Is your web site working hard enough for you? Run it through the following 20 point fitness assessment to find out:

- Is your site fully search engine compatible? Are all your pages being indexed by the major search engines?

- Do you track your visitor statistics on a regular basis? Do you use the information provided by your visitor statistics to improve your site?

- Is your web site accessible to visually-impaired visitors? Does it meet the international standards set down by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)?

- Do you know which sites and search engines provide you with the most traffic? Do you use this information to increase your traffic further?

- Do you track the source of all reported errors in your site statistics and fix them promptly?

- Do you know which keywords your site was found for in the search engines? Have you conducted keyword research to determine what search terms your target markets are looking for so you can optimize for them?

- Does your web site HTML code validate to W3 standards? Do you check for validation regularly?

- Does your site contain zero broken links? Do you check for and fix broken links regularly?

- Has your site been fully search engine optimized to integrate your target search terms into your Page Titles, META Tags and visible page text?

- Have you created and submitted an XML sitemap to Google Sitemaps?

- Have you created and submitted a sitemap to Yahoo Site Explorer?

- Have you checked to see if your site meets Google's Webmaster Guidelines?

- Do you measure your visitor sign-ups and conversions on a regular basis? Do you tweak your landing page copy to increase the conversion rates?

- Is your site navigation intuitive and are your visitors following the navigation paths you intended?

- Do you encourage feedback from your site visitors and provide an obvious way for them to provide such feedback?

- Are there at least 250 words of text on your home page to satisfy search engines?

- Does your site contain a visible, text-based site map to aid user navigation?

- Do you have an ongoing link building campaign running to secure more incoming links to your site and improve your site's link popularity score?

- Does your site have a high percentage of repeat visitors? Are the majority of your visitors staying on your site for more than a minute?

- Do your search engine referrals and site traffic figures grow each month?

Unless you can answer yes to all the questions in the above checklist, your web site is not working hard enough for you and needs a workout. Get to it!