One of the big problems with the piece as-written is that there are a number of places where I said “CMS” where I should have said something more generic, like “publishing platform”. Where I’m headed with it is that the “CMS” proper should shrink back and become strictly a CMS — exactly like Contentful.com — and leave everything that doesn’t involve the create/update/delete of assets to other software.
That said, I tried out Contentful.com a few months ago, and it just wouldn’t work for me for serious usage with a large and diverse pool of freelancers. (More on that in a sec.) As for the stuff that you’re suggesting editors may want to do, that actually falls in the production phase and not the editing phase. Of course, at a lot of shops the editor also does the production/layout stuff, but the distinction between editing and production matters for workflow.
So why wouldn’t I be comfortable giving freelancers a Contenful.com login and asking them to submit? Before I can answer that question, I have to make explicit the two primary constraints that almost all freelancers on the web operate under, a pair of constraints that matter more than anything else: 1) they are compensated per-piece, 2) and that compensation is extremely low. These constraints mean that the process of putting an article into the CMS— adding images, tagging it, and submitting it to a “Pending” queue (which Contentful.com doesn’t have), etc. — must be as fast and painless as possible.
These folks are only making like $25 per post, maybe even less, and as their editor I need them to spend most of the limited time that they can dedicate to each post writing and revising words; any time they spend fishing around in the interface to get the right image into the right spot, or to assemble a gallery, or figuring out how to do something, is time they’re not spending on the content itself. And at the end of the day, the content pays the bills.
Because Contenful.com doesn’t have the little things that make the process fast, things like “I want to insert an image, but only show me the images I’ve uploaded to this post”, I have to use WP instead.
Anyway, I’m not slamming Contenful.com — it’s a great product and I look forward to seeing it evolve into something I can use. I’m just saying that all of that production stuff you mentioned is small potatoes compared this issue of “how can a large, diverse pool of poorly paid, time-starved freelancers get their words and pictures into this as quickly as possible.” I would rather have those small touches at the cost of making an editor who wants to re-use content across multiple articles to just cut and paste it a bunch of times, than to have my freelancers work more slowly yet have all sorts of fancy production features.
My ultimate point is that WP works very well for the writing/editing phase. Yeah it’s gross in spots, and there are a bunch of things I’d improve on, but when it comes to the writing/editing phase of the content production workflow in specific, I’m willing to trade editor/producer/dev time for freelancer time. Over time, a small feature that makes 100 freelancers each a little bit faster per-article has a much higher impact on content quantity and quality than a large feature that makes a few editors or producers a lot faster on the occasional speciality/feature piece.
To put it another way, Intel’s dictum for improving microprocessors was always, “make the common case fast.” Harried, underpaid freelancers dumping content into a CMS is the common case that a focused CMS (i.e. one that focuses on authorized users CRUDing an asset repository, and leaves the reader/advertiser/publisher-facing stuff to other software) must optimize.
