I’ve been running into a big problem as of late with the content management systems I use. Currently my main preference is WordPress, but I sometimes use Drupal if I need a little more power.
The Problem
All mainstream content management systems define a single content area. This is often not the case as website designs become more complex. Sure, with systems like WordPress and Drupal you can assign a sidebar with widgets, but that only extends the problem.
Let’s take a case where we have a 8 page site, with a blog. On each of the 8 pages, we want our primary content along the side, but we want bullet points (different for each page) listed down the sidebar. With CMS the way they are now, we essentially have to register a sidebar for each of those pages.
A Better Way?
There must be a better way to handle this. Why not have multiple content areas and allow you to edit the area of the page you need to.
Do you have any ideas on how to make content management systems better? Do you know of any current systems that do this already? Are there any plugins that extend this functionality to mainstream CMS?
Some other plugins that might be helpful or WP, to make it more “CMS-y” are the “More” plugins from More Plugins They have plugins for More Types, More Fields and More Taxonomies.
In wordpress, you can create custom fields that would allow you to populate something like a per-page sidebar; you just pull the content from querying the post-meta, and push that into some area on your page.
I dunno if that fully solves your issue, but it seems like a good first step.
This, for the most part, is what I’ve been doing. The problem is that passing this off to clients is not really an acceptable solution. The text field box is very small, and they loose the WYSIWYG editor.
This CMS is easy to use, and you can define as many content areas per page as you like. You have full control over HTML and CSS (none is written for you). You can also include a page section on as many pages as you like.
