The math makes my head hurt already.

If any when you do manage to find a handful of solutions that you feel might answer your particular needs, your challenge will be in settling on one system out of many. How do you decide what stays and what goes?

Here are some of the top three myths that lead people astray:

Myth No. 3 — A CMS is ready “out of the box”.

General Perception:

Content Management Systems provide website administrators with everything they need to launch, manage, and maintain a website with little to no effort.

Reality Check:

Launching a website is never as easy as 1, 2, 3.

The level of effort and resources required to get a CMS up and running corresponds directly to the business requirements of the site, and size/complexity of the CMS.

Forget what was advertized on the box.

If you’re in a position where you’re still thinking about which CMS to go with, consider talking to customers who are actively using the software. Compare notes. Ask specifically about how key features worked for them or more importantly, what didn’t work for them and why.

This is a good opportunity to consider your own requirements for needing a CMS. It’s easy to get lost in all the hype and lose sight of why you needed it in the first place, so put your needs into writing and use your list as a guide post when evaluating features.

Myth No. 2 — Anyone can use a CMS.

General Perception:

“If you can use MS Word, you can use a CMS”.

Reality Check:

Understand that every CMS subscribes to a different philosophy when it comes to working with content. The methodology behind the workflow might make sense for one group and be totally alien to another, which makes it more difficult when you’re attempting to do feature comparisons (ultimately, they all follow a few common strategies).

It comes down to the User Experience.

You cannot legitimately equate the whole experience of using a CMS to something like MS Word. You can legitimately equate a feature of the CMS to MS Word (if it exists).

The User Experience between a system like “Joomla!”, “Magnolia”, or “Drupal” are dramatically different. I won’t get too deep into the how and why of things, but suffice to say that if your comparison between package was based only on side-by-side comparisons of their interfaces, you’d immediately see how different they are from each other.

Consider who will actually be using the CMS. Is it a group of developers or is it a group off general staffers tasked with the responsibility? Think about the end user here; it’s not the site visitor who will be directly affected by the CMS, but the people managing the content.

What kind of interface are they most comfortable using (WYSIWYG, form based, code)? Do any of them have working experience with HTML, CSS or a scripting language?

This is your red flag.

Stop.

Take a step back and look to your content team — get their input.

Myth No. 1 — A CMS should manage everything.

General Perception:

Content Management Systems are designed to manage all of a website’s content and features.

Reality Check:

Content Management Systems come in all flavours, but not one of them handles every facet of a website in an elegant manner (thus the reasons for Myth No. 2, 3).

I’m not quite sure how this myth started, but I’m sure anyone who has had the opportunity to work with a CMS understands this: there is an expectation that a CMS has the ability manage the content of every single asset, feature, function, or concept in a given website.

This is so – dangerously – far from the truth.

Think about it this way: Your CMS does not define your website.

Read that last sentence again. Memorize it for the next time you’re making recommendations to your clients or shopping around for yourself.

A CMS is designed to help you manage content, but unless engineered to be, two websites are never the same beast. Content volume, features, design, strategies can vary wildly, and so it is next to impossible to have a single CMS (out of the box) manage every aspect of a website without running into the need to extend, include plug-ins, or write unique code to support the site’s particular requirements.

Consider that feat the Holy Grail of all CMS.

Be realistic about what you need a CMS to do. Think about the content of your site, and if you haven’t already, consider bringing on a Content Strategist to help you define the Information Architecture.

An important thing you should try to understand is that you don’t need one tool to manage everything – in the real world, you need a toolbox full of the the most reliable, appropriate tools to help you manage your website content.

Things to consider when you do manage to find a suitable CMS.

It’s easy to get misled by the marketing and hype, and technical jargon around a CMS. If you can only remember three things before you start searching, keep the following in mind:

1. Find a tool that your organization can implement: Speak to your development team/IT to get a realistic scope on what it will take to get up and running.
2. Realize who will actually use the software: Most importantly, interview your content management group to find out what their expectations (and level of experience) is with a CMS or similar software.
3. Develop a content strategy: Interview the key stakeholders to find out what the common needs are, and what the business requirements are for the website – don’t engineer your content to fit the limitations of one tool.

Ultimately speaking, a CMS is just one tool for the task of managing the content of your website, and sometimes you need different tools to do the job. There is no doubt that finding the right tool is going to be an easy task – expect a difficult road – but with a little forethought, some planning, and a good understanding of your needs (not wants), choosing a CMS will be less painful in the long run.

Cropping:

The cropping features in WLW improves the productivity for a writer with limited time by providing an easy to use interface for adding custom crops to images used in the post. Access to the cropping features is located under the “advanced” tab available when a new image is inserted into the post. From there, you can select from a list of image manipulation actions – in this case “crop…”. What makes this single feature truly useful is the list of available defaults such as a “square” crop that automatically constrains the cropping selection. The devil is in the details with this one, as the author is able to see what the crop looks like in the editor window as the crop selection is being dragged.

Tabbed View Switching:

Like many bloggers, I like to see how my posting will appear on the live blog before I commit to a posting. In earlier versions of the software you had to use the menu bar or shortcut keys to jump back and forth, but the the new tabs at the bottom of the main editing window work much better.

Auto Linking:

It’s about time. Seriously, though – this is a feature that I’ve been hoping someone would develop. I’m not sure if it’s unique or not, but it certainly saves me a lot of time creating links to sites. If you’re not familiar with the feature, what it does is provide a secondary library of terms and names that the editor uses to create automatic links for. For example, if you typed the name WordPress into the editor, a link would be created from that name. There are some limitations to the feature of course (and this can be solved by creating a couple common permutations of the term), for example: “WordPress” vs. WordPress (without the quotes). What’s more, you can set some basic conditions around how many times the link appears in a single post (avoiding link clutter).

Video Embedding:

Windows Live Writer has some nifty built in feature that allow authors to embed video in their postings from popular services as well as giving the author an opportunity to preview the video before committing it to the posting.

I personally don’t add a lot of extra media to my posts (maybe I should), but in all honesty I can see this feature being quite popular for power-bloggers.

Full Feature List (available official blog)

• New border treatments (including Instant Photo)
• Crop and tilt photos
• Insert multiple photos
• Toolbar alignment commands enabled for images
• Insert and upload Windows Live photo albums
• Insert and publish video to YouTube
• Additional spell checking languages: Arabic, Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, English (Australia),
• Estonian, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak,
• Slovenian, Turkish, and Ukrainian
• Server-side tagging (for supported blogs)
• Type-down filtering in the Open dialog
• Twitter, Digg and Flickr Plug-ins
• Improved blog account setup
• Lightbox and Windows Live Spaces inline preview support
• Improved category control: adding categories, type-down filtering
• Tabbed view switching
• AutoLink glossary
• Smart quotes/typographic characters
• Word count
• Support for bidirectional languages (like Hebrew and Arabic)
• Tabs for view switching
• Updated look and feel

Conclusion:

All in all, if Windows Live Writer keeps on this development track, I can see it quickly becoming a standard blogging tool for PC based users (If you’re on Mac, I’m sure there are a handful of great apps you can leverage).

For more information about Windows Live Writer, visit the website here.

Here are a few screenshots of the product:

Features

Here are some of the features from the website:

Unlimited hierarchically structured page navigation menu
The page navigation menu provides critical information and functions. It allows you to perform quickly common actions on pages and shows how information has been organized.

Drag and drop page ordering
This function simplifies the organization of your site’s pages. It makes new sorting arrangements of pages possible.

Flexible page content: body, sidebar, extended, summary
Each page can have its own customized parts (divisions). It can be ‘extended’ text for news, or ‘summary’ for article: you can define whatever you want, whenever you want. These can even be used for extended metadata fields.

Per page layout customization
Pages can have their own layout, or can inherit the layout of the parent page, or they can reuse another page layout. This allows the site owner to make every page look exactly as desired.

Simple and reusable content snippets
You can define ‘snippets’: small pieces of content used across several pages, like page headers or footers, or contact info, etc. This means less cut-and-paste text in your pages. This will reduce your modification time when you need to add, remove or change the text in it.

Other

• Password protected administration.
• Simple user and permission management.
• File manager (plugin) allows you to upload, browse and edit files.

Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing, and WordPress is no exception. There are many plugins that offer surprisingly similar features with the exception that one might handle the same task in a slightly different manner.

Sifting through plugin lists isn’t fun either.

I thought I would share a short list of the WordPress plugins that I found to be useful without being too gimmicky.

Posts

Plugin: the_excerpt Reloaded

URL: http://guff.szub.net/2005/02/26/the_excerpt-reloaded/

Description: Displays the excerpt of a posting (or uses the content of your post if no excerpt is available), and formats the excerpt accordingly.

This plugin was developed in 2005, and there are other similar plugins that have come along since, but I like this one simply because it works as advertised. If you’ve downloaded and installed my theme, you’ll notice that I use it in areas such as the main posting, and in the archive or past postings.

Plugin: “Add to Any: Share/Save/Bookmark Button”

URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/add-to-any/

Description: Adding social bookmark features can be a bit of a pain, and implementations are inconsistent. This plugin takes the pain out of adding social bookmarking abilities to your postings using a very simple UI for the user to interact with.

Comments

Plugin: Get Recent Comments

URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/get-recent-comments/

Description: Displays a formatted list of the most recent comments on your site. This plugin has a number of new features, but I typically use only the basic features — for me it’s a time saver, as well as a quick and easy way to implement a comment list without a lot of work.

Archives

Plugin: SRG Clean Archives

URL: http://www.geekwithlaptop.com/projects/clean-archives/

Description: Displays a formatted list of your archived posts with additional functionality for animation and user interaction.

I just love the fact that I can take this plugin and output an archive with minimal fuss. I disable all of the additional features and apply my own CSS to customize the look and feel. It’s really quite easy, and if you’re into experimenting with some of the extra JavaScript features, you can come up with some fun results.

You don’t need a lot of plugins to enhance the features of your blog, and I personally recommend against relying heavily on plugins; instead, I do recommend that you pick plugins that effectively suit the features you need to communicate better on your blog.

For the most part, niche applications  like PowerWriter attempted to capitalize on the "more is better" syndrome that affect applications at the time. For the experienced writer, this wasn’t an issue. Most professional writers had their own tools and process for writing and needed little in the way of gadgets and gimmicks to be productive. What gimmicky applications did however, was to instill aspiring writers with the perception that they needed expensive, complex tools to be a successful writer.

It’s nearing the end of 2007 and while I still see many of those applications kicking around, there are also a handful of applications that forsake complexity in favour of minimalism — "less is more…".

Not surprisingly, most of these applications tend to be developed for the Mac OS. Perhaps this is simply and example of inspiration (Apple is well known for their minimalist approach to hardware and software), but whatever the case, the trend seems to have caught on, and there seems to be more applications out there that shirk complexity.

Mac OS Applications for the Creative Writer:

Here are some examples of Mac applications that follow a "less is more" philosophy (in comparison to MS Word and other word processors):

Avenir

What they say: Avenir is a new kind of software for writers. Part word processor, part database, completely focused on the creative process. Whether you are brainstorming for your first short story or putting the finishing touches on your latest best-seller Avenir provides the tools you need to manage the creative process from inception to publication.

Scrivener

What they say: Scrivener is a word processor and project management tool created specifically for writers of long texts such as novels and research papers. It won’t try to tell you how to write – it just makes all the tools you have scattered around your desk available in one application.

Ulysses

What they say: Ulysses was developed mainly for writers who work creatively with text and want or need to realize large amounts of text. With traditional word processors and text editors, the user is either being promoted to the job of a type setter or needs to bother himself with other inadequacies those applications have.

Writeroom

What they say: WriteRoom is not Microsoft Word. It won’t generate a table of contents, it won’t place borders around your documents, and it doesn’t have an animated paper-clip looking over your shoulder. Instead WriteRoom just provides the essential features required to get words on the page. Stay focused with WriteRoom’s distraction free environment. Stay on track with word count. Stay safe with autosave. You just type, and WriteRoom will do its best to stay out of your way.

Z-Write

What they say: Z-Write is a unique word processor designed for creative writers. In the process of writing a story, writers tend to create dozens or even hundreds of pages of notes, character bios, rewrites, reminders, and bits of research info. Organizing all that material within the linear structure of a traditional word processor is awkward at best… Z-Write changes all that. It allows you to create an unlimited number of Sections and each Section can have as much or as little text as you’d like.

Windows Applications for the Creative Writer:

Here are some examples of Windows applications that follow a "less is more" philosophy (in comparison to MS Word and other word processors):

PageFour

What they say: PageFour is a tabbed word processor and outliner for writers. It has a simple structure based around Notebooks. Each Notebook contains as many Folders and Pages as you wish, and is structured in whichever manner best suits YOU. Every writer works differently, and PageFour recognizes this.

JDarkRoom

What they say: JDarkRoom is a popular, simple full-screen text file editor with none of the usual bells and whistles that might distract you from the job in hand. If you are writing a novel, essay, thesis or just need to be able to concentrate on your writing, then JDarkRoom may help you.

DarkRoom

What they say: Dark Room is a full screen, distraction free, writing environment. Unlike standard word processors that focus on features, Dark Room is just about you and your text.

…

That’s it in my opinion. Sad isn’t it?

Windows continues to foster bloated applications, and when it comes to software for Creative Writers, it becomes increasingly frustrating to find anything that’s remotely productive. Recent versions of windows haven’t overcome that hurdle. Keep in mind however that this does not really take into account text editors.

I love text editors simply for the fact that most of them claim to do only one simple thing, and that is to edit text.

Software developers seem to overlook the fundamental task of a writer: to write. And really, if you think about it, what more does a writer need than something to capture their ideas and thoughts. In the publishing world, they have typesetters who specialize in formatting. It’s what they are paid to do, and it is what they excel at doing. Writers need not deal with formatting to the extent of becoming typesetters. About the only time that writers can legitimately (and successfully) attempt typesetting, is when they’re ready to submit and so, must follow some basic (very basic) formatting guidelines for their finished pieces.

While it’s true, some text editors overstep their bounds — most of these text editors are aimed at developers (see: Text Editors on 43Folders) — there are a handful that do what they’re intended to (I’m not going to promote MS NotePad — it’s just a P.O.S in my opinion).

Examples of Windows-based text editors:

Here are some examples of text editors that I use for various purposes, but have at one point or another been my tool of choice when writing.

MetaPad

What the developer says: Once upon a time, one of the most useful programs for everyday use was known as Microsoft Notepad. I realized that Notepad was quite powerful and did a lot of what I wanted in a simple text editor. Yet I found the user interface to be unlike most 32-bit Windows applications and actually quite poor…

MetaPad is a small, fast (and completely free) text editor for Windows 9x/NT/XP with similar features to Microsoft Notepad but with many extra (and rather useful) features. It was designed to completely replace Notepad since it includes all of Notepad’s features and much, much more.

Phrasis

What the developers say: Phrasis is a is a stripped down text editor. We want to remove any feature that might hinder the productivity of a professional (or serious amateur) writer and add any feature that would increase the efficiency (of must our users). Therefore, we’ve created an interface with only the bare essentials, no menus, no formatting features and no nonsense.

The right tool for the job

I leave it up the individual writer to select their tool of choice; I’ve worked with almost all of these packages at one point or another, and many of them have great features and strengths. I continually find myself coming back to text editors. If you’re sick of both word processors and text editors, you can always fall back onto older methods — hello, DOS applications!

If you have come across applications that you feel meet the task of a writer, please feel free to comment. I would love to compile a more comprehensive list of applications that other users have experienced and are satisfied with, rather than trolling Google and reading dubious reviews.

At the recommendation of a friend, I decided to give Windows Live Writer a whirl. After getting past my initial frustrations with installing the software (I’ll detail that shortly), I’m actually quite pleased with the product. I know it’s only beta, but it runs and feels like a solid Release Candidate. The UI is pretty typical of Windows Software in terms of look and feel, but they’ve opted for a less is more mantra in this particular case. The toolbars are absent of the dozen or so controls and icons you might expect of a Microsoft product, instead there are only the typical options for formatting that you might see in a TinyMCE editor (found in most blogging platforms). On top of that, Windows Live Writer can interface with some of the most popular logging platforms currently available.

What I like about Windows Live Writer:

Note: my comments and opinions are largely coloured by the fact that I prefer WordPress over most other blogging platforms, and so if it seems the review is particular skewed towards WordPress features — it is.

• Multi-platform support: Easy setup with popular blogging platforms such as WordPress – I would never have bothered to evaluate this software if it didn’t at least include WordPress as a supported blogging platform.
• The Editor: WYSWYG Editing – say what you want about this feature in other software, I personally like to see what my blog postings look like with my style sheet applied to it. One of my minor frustrations is seeing my titles and headlines wrap onto multiple lines leaving widows (single words on a new line). With Windows Live Writer, I can adjust my titles and headlines in real-time to my satisfaction. WLW has built-in support for toggling between rendering modes (Normal, Web Layout, Web Preview, HTML Code).
• Keyboard Support: Inserting objects and links are easy with accelerator key support – Ctrl + K (insert link), Ctrl + L (insert image). There is also additional support for embedded media, tables, etc. Most of this you can get online already, but it’s nice that the software took this into consideration and provided it in a single place in the UI.
• Formatting: Windows Live Writer uses the style sheets you are currently hosting online. While I’ve mentioned it’s WYSWYG features, this again shows how something as simple as seeing your custom block quotes in the editor, exemplifies attention to detail. The same applies to links. I have an inline style for my links in my posts and they show up in the editor exactly as they would appear in my browser.
• Blog Post Meta: WLW supports many of WordPress’ "post meta" features such as: the ability to enable/disable comments; allow/deny pings; set the post slug; set the post excerpt; specify Trackback URL’s.
• Reminders: If you take the time to set your application’s preferences before you start using it — you probably won’t, but it’s something you can do later — you’ll notice that in the preferences window, you have the option to set reminders for simple things such as: reminders for setting categories; reminders for setting tags. I always forget this stuff and end up going back later on to update the post. I hate reminders in most cases, but this I can live with if it saves me the hassle of dealing with it later.
• Saving: WLW allows you to save drafts of your postings locally or to your blog host. This means if my wireless craps out I can continue editing offline and publish once I get back into a wifi zone. Not such a big deal, but its a benefit of the software that you don’t always have to rely upon a network connection to write a blog post.
• Linking: A nice little productivity feature of WLW is its ability to let you insert links to your previous postings by letting you browse your postings inside the insert dialog (insert>Hyperlink Dialog>Link to). What this means from an editing standpoint is I no longer have to open another window or tab to browse my archives and copy the link, then jump back to my post and insert the link through the dialog.
• Spell Checking: Yes, I know, it’s not the holy grail of all features, but it certainly helps that the spell checker works as a spell checker aught — at least what we’ve been conditioned to expect with Windows. Still, it’s an expected feature that’s built into the software and another nice consideration feature for those blog authors who think faster than they type.

What I don’t like about Windows Live Writer:

• Installation: I had to run the installation twice because the first time I ran it, I was asked to install additional software (for Live Spaces), which I did not want or would use. Since I refused to install the additional software, the installation refused to proceed instead of defaulting to just installing Windows Live Writer.
• Dependencies: Windows Live Writer is built on the .NET framework (as are more recent windows applications). I work on a Vista-based system and the .NET framework was pre-installed. While this isn’t a major point of contention for me (I’ve installed other frameworks to evaluate software in the past), I would have preferred the application be as standalone (read: portable) as possible. Users on systems without the .NET framework will need to install the software before they run the installation. WLW will download it for you…
• Screen Jumping: There are times when the editor will simply jump to the beginning of a post or to some seemingly random place on screen and I’m left wondering what the hell happened. This typically occurs when I apply formatting to a piece of text.
• Cross Platform: okay, this is a pretty typical gripe and coming from someone who is completely Mac-tarded, it may mean very little. But to my point: I’m really loving the user experience with WLW and I think this is something that other user may very well appreciate. It’s unfortunate that Microsoft has to conquer the world before people can share this experience without issue.

Final Thoughts

While I have my particular gripes about working in a browser for everything, I understand there are folks out there who don’t mind it at all. With the gulf between desktop and web-based applications decreasing, it’s not implausible to think that this software may very well appear in other incarnations like a version of Flock.

Windows Live Writer is a comfortable application that I can confidently integrate into to support my blogging habits. It doesn’t ask more than what your current experience has conditioned you for. It’s intuitive enough that new authors who prefer desktop applications of their web-based counter parts, aren’t intimidated and may even encourage blogging as a regular activity.

Give Windows Live Writer a whirl. It will not cost you more than a single test post, and if you’re disappointed by it, you can chalk it up to another Microsoft product and toss it in the recycle bin.

Mind mapping is not anything new — it has been around for quite some time and while I cannot attest to the degree of its current popularity, I will admit that it has greatly improved my productivity.

By nature, I am not so much of a linear thinker – at least most of the time. Depending on the task or discussion at hand, I may think in circles; I may run off on a tangent; I may need to follow some linear progression, but all the while still keeping other concepts and ideas in the back of my head.

Traditional note taking is fine in most cases, but once I get into brainstorming mode things start to fall apart.

I stumbled upon MindMeister whist searching for freeware mind mapping software, and while there are a few nice packages available that do the job (such as MindJet’s “MindManager” suite of tools), I needed something immediate, and accessible by my team and clients.

MindMister is a web-based mind mapping tool with a service model that is both economical for the average user, and affordable for the power users. There are three packages to choose from:

1. Free - you can create, share, import/export and collaborate on maps;
2. Premium - I have not actually upgraded my account so I am not quite sure what additional features are offered here, but the price is hardly something to balk at;
3. Team - which has enhanced functionality for collaborative environments.

Enjoy one of three simple packages, each offering a respectable feature-set of what you would expect from desktop-based software and more.

I had a recent opportunity to work with a client in the UK (I live and work in Canada) on a collaborative map, and the real-time updates were a great little feature (while using the free account). The application was responsive, very intuitive, and had great keyboard support. This third feature was the selling point for me as I hate to click around screen too much. Most web-based applications fall on their face when it comes to the user experience, and small things like integrated keyboard support, proper tabbing, toolbar layout really work to round out the whole experience.

The aesthetic quality of the application is just pure candy for the eye. Kudos to the design team who worked on it.

On top of the aforementioned features, MindMeister offers some invisible features such as state/editing history, autosaving (for those still paranoid about losing data) , and strong export/import support for existing users of desktop-based software (MindManager, FreeMind, etc.).

Now, for those Mashup feinds out there — MindMeister also offers an extensible API for creating your own applications as well as a robust library of gadgets for integration into your workflow.

Overall, it is rare that I come across a well-rounded productivity tool — desktop-based or otherwise. When you get a chance, give the free account at MindMeister and whirl. It wont cost you anything but a few minutes of your lunch break.

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After about an hour of testing out various apps like w.bloggar, BlogJet, WbEditor, I came across an article on Dan Master’s blog (idano): WordPress Desktop Client Search – Zoundry Review. I’m in the process of testing it out right now and in fact this post is written and formatted in Zoundry. So far it seems to work as advertised and I found a couple little pleasant surprises like the preview using your own custom template; saving/storing of unpublished drafts locally (as opposed to WP’s drafts); Post Tagging; and a slew of other nice formatting features. I think the biggest thing for me at this point is the accelerator keys for the different formatting options like creating links or turning existing text into a hyperlink. Even some of the more familiar accelerator keys for bold or italics are available. Little things like that make it much more pleasant to write.

Here are a couple of screenshots if you want to take a look:

View Image

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I still think I might find myself jumping back into MS Word on occasion for some of my lengthier postings. As I understand it Zoundry is in beta right now; from a UI standpoint it still needs a bit of spit and polish to really make it shine, but the overall ease of use and access to typical functions make it a worthwhile download in my opinion. Give it a whirl!

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