When thinking content management, go open source
This post has been sponsored by Acquia. Acquia provides the leading cloud platform for building, delivering, and optimizing digital experiences on Drupal.
I am working with a client who has budgeted £2 million for the procurement of a content management system (CMS). £2 million! This boggles my mind.
But that is what you pay for an enterprise level content management system these days. A system that is robust, scalable and has the level of support a ‘grown up’ organisation needs. At least that is what the CMS vendors will tell you.
Now I am not a developer. I am no expert in technical architecture, security or scalability. Yet I have talked with many providers of commercial content management systems. In all those conversations I have never heard anything that makes me think what they offer is preferable to open source.
The benefits of open source
I am a huge fan of open source. In fact I struggle to think of a scenario where I would recommend a commercial CMS over an open source one. It just makes more sense to me.
I struggle to think of a scenario where I would recommend a commercial CMS over an open source one.
The most obvious benefit is value for money. Why pay huge amounts for a content management system when there are open source systems available? When the content management system itself is free you can focus investment on other more important areas. Areas such as performance, security and robustness. Areas such as the content itself or customising the CMS to your specific needs.
Bizarrely this seems to make many organisations nervous. How can it be any good if the system is freely available? But that kind of thinking doesn’t work in the world of open source. When it comes to open source platforms like Drupal, investment in new features is down to demand, not how much it costs to develop.
Also an open source project like Drupal has thousands of volunteers working on it. These volunteers pour way more hours into it then any commercial vendor could justify. This means more features. But it also means less bugs. The more eyes looking at the code, the more bugs they will spot and fix.
The fact that an open source CMS is free to download means more developers use it. This will make recruitment for your digital team easier. No need to compete for that handful of developers with experience in your commercial platform.
The numbers of people using an platform like Drupal also means excellent community support. If you are facing a problem in Drupal, a quick Google will turn up somebody who has faced the problem before and solved it.
Open source means no more hoping your commercial CMS provider rolls out that piece of functionality you need.
This community doesn’t just help overcome problems, they are also adding to the power of the application. No more waiting and hoping your commercial CMS provider decides to roll out that piece of functionality you need. The chances are somebody has already built what you need and shared it online. If they haven’t you can just get a developer to build a plugin for you.
With so many reasons to use open source it is amazing that some organisations still avoid it. Yet they do.
Debunking the supposed drawbacks
Some of the reasons organisations avoid open source are political. Buying a commercial platform is the “safe choice”. It is how IT departments have always done things. Buy in an off-the-shelf system. Job done! Nobody gets fired for playing safe. For doing things the way they have always been done.
But that is not always the reason. Some organisations have concerns about open source systems like Drupal. Concerns that are largely unjustified.
Open source solutions are not as scalable or robust
One common criticism of open source is that it isn’t as robust or scalable as commercial systems. But these days that argument is harder and harder to make. After all millions of websites rely on Drupal, many of which experience huge levels of traffic. Sites like the Whitehouse, Oxfam and CERN. But there are many others too. Sites of every size and in every sector.
There are also experts like Acquia who specialise in providing Drupal hosting. Hosting that scales and remains reliable under the heaviest of loads. Experts that also ensure the security of these sites.
Open source is less secure
Many claim that if your source code is available for the world to see it makes it easy to hack. At face value this makes sense. But in reality this isn’t true.
By making the code open to all, security holes are quickly spotted by the community and plugged. Yes a few bad apples maybe looking to breach that security. But many more want to make the code as secure as possible. For example you can bet that the US Government is keen to ensure the Whitehouse website is not vulnerable to hackers!
Of course, if you do have concerns you can once again turn to a company like Acquia to provide that extra level of security. They can also help with another common criticism around support.
You don’t get enterprise support
One of the most common objections about open source is that you don’t have support if things go wrong. Companies are willing to pay a lot of money to know they have somebody to help them if there is a problem.
That doesn’t mean you have to buy a commercial system. You can hire a company to provide this support if you need it. But with such a strong community even this is not always necessary. There are no shortage of places you can turn if you need help solving a problem.
What if people stop supporting the system
Of course this is all well and good as long as the community remains robust. But what happens if your choice of open source CMS falls out of favour? What if developers stop developing it and the community fades away?
It is possible this might happen. But choices like Drupal have been around for years. What is more with so many prominent sites reliant on it this is unlikely to happen.
In fact there is more chance that your CMS vendor will stop supporting your commercial platform. Remember my client who is spending £2 million on their CMS? They are having to change their system because the company who ran the old one is no longer supporting it.
There are better ways to spend your money
Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying there is anything wrong with commercial content management systems. I am just saying there are better places you could spend that money.
You could spend it on customising an open source system to better suit your organisations specific needs. Or you could spend it on building a content team who produce high quality content.
My point is that we should think long and hard before spending money that could be better spent elsewhere. That we should make our default position open source and have a good reason if we want to consider a commercial solution instead.
Originally published at boagworld.com on October 20, 2015.
