I think the real question to ask would be: Can a CMS really be beneficial for me?
And the answer is: Probably only for a blog (ie. WordPress, Drupal)
Oh my god you say, what is this freak saying, with a CMS, even authors can edit your site, which necessarily makes production much faster. Makes sense, at least, that’s what I thought until very recently.
Consider this: What do you authors know about the web?
They probably don’t know much. Most of your authors use Word, and they most likely don’t know how to use it. Just look at their Word documents and you’ll quickly realized how dirty they are. No one knows what a style is and they all style the document the best they can via manual select and click bold/italic or whatever. The problem? They’ll do the same with a CMS, regardless of the editor, because they just don’t know.
Quite frankly, a CMS is like suicide when it comes to accessibility. Why allow people to edit content on the web when they don’t know how it works. Too often occurrences such as titles in CAPS, bold + bigger font instead of header, and an absolute horror when it comes to images placed on your website, not mentioning the inconsistencies, will nag your site.
You could establish strict editing rules, but then you start lacking in flexibility, and you’re guaranteed some people just won’t respect those rules unless you tell them directly, which may not be an option in a large enterprise.
Conversely, a good webmaster will know all of these content things naturally. Seriously, if your webmaster writes a title in CAPS, fire him.
Consider this: What CMS is prebuilt to scale?
For a lot of people, having a CMS means avoiding complication. If you give a lot of powers to the authors, you don’t even have to upload the images yourself. However, does an author really know that you need to optimize these images. Forget about teaching them to upload the images to a separate subdomain for static delivery.
A solution may be to make all of this integrated into your CMS. But truthfully, it’s a huge bother and no CMS was probably made to handle such a complex content distribution mechanism. You’ll spend more hours debugging and tailoring your CMS solution then you would if you weren’t using one at all.
Don’t mix it
I think the best solution is to simply not mix content people with web people. They are two very different breeds of thought processes and it’s very rare a good author will know a lot about the web beyond using its user services like email and chat. Real applications are often too complicated to bother with a CMS, which will often put a huge supplementary load on webmasters, especially those who handle the CSS. And so they’ll spend time on managing the CMS they could have spent on managing the actual site code, quality, security and scalability.
In my opinion, even for a largely content-based web site, a CMS is just too much overhead to be worth it. And, you don’t need a CMS to stop copy pasting every menu change on your site, there’s some very simply alternatives with PHP includes, or just about any language/framework you may use to power your application/website.
