CMS Evalution

Background

We were tasked to pick a CMS that we can extend and customize to meet vision of the content workflow design research project. Even though it's a short-term project, whatever choice we make will likely be used for the MVP for resident-facing content in Jan. Deciding what we should use to deliver by the Jan deadline is potentially different from weighing the pros and cons for long-term recommendation.

At the same time, it's important to discuss the resident experience. If residents are unhappy with the new content, the project will be unsuccessful. This also seems like the more interesting engineering challenge for the dev team.

In order to start customizing the admin and also starting to prototype the resident experience quickly, we're choosing to begin the MVP using Wagtail. Drupal & Wagtail can both be customized to implement the features we need. There might be short term benefits to going with Drupal in terms of setting up the Admin UI without much dev effort. However, the long term attractiveness of using Python, building off of Django CMS, seems like a plus for onboarding new developers and for custom extensibility.

User Types

These are the 3 users we need to keep in mind for this project:

1. Developer Based on current makeup of team & future recruiting, Wagtail is a better choice
2. Resident Both Drupal and Wagtail can be used to for creating the resident-facing portion (since we plan to decouple the technology we use to display the content from whatever CMS is chosen)
3. Content Staff Both Drupal and Wagtail can be used for creating the admin interface

CMS Comparison

Wagtail Pros	Wagtail Cons	Drupal Pros	Drupal Cons
It will be easier to recruit python/django devs than php/drupal devs	More developer time needed to setup content models	Lots of installations, including friends of the city like boston.gov & mass.gov	Little/no expertise on existing dev team
The python developer community is huge in Austin	Smaller community and install-base	Most tasks can be done without a developer	Need a lot of experience to prevent bad decisions
Several people on the team have existing python/django experience		Lots of modules & themes	The right documentation can be difficult to find
Documentation is clear & abundant		Documentation is abundant	Upgrades seem to be problematic
Devs control the creation of content models			Modules seem to give some functionality, but seem like a starting point instead of something that will fully implement a feature
Ability for Austin to influence decisions & be a thought-leader due to smaller ecosystem

Initial Plan

• CMS admin site
  • Setup wagtail instance to begin customization
  • Gather list of features for MVP from existing documents & Celine's team
• Resident-facing site
  • Start defining patterns that are needed for content (develop pattern library)
  • Prototype technology for generating HTML