Successful content management is key to today's enterprise-level digital ecosystem. Finding a content management system (CMS) that is flexible and scalable with growing business needs is vital and, as luck would have it, we have advice on a wide variety of solutions.
With all of 20+ years of experience working with CMSes -Drupal, WordPress, etc., and custom CMSes prior to that - you might be curious what our current top recommendation for a content management system is, and the answer might surprise you. We are advocating for a direct to AWS cloud CMS solution:
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How to pick the best Headless CMS
In the past few years, Metal Toad has increasingly migrated clients to headless CMS providers to reduce costs, improve the content owner experience, and open the doors to future technology innovations that
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How often should I update my website?
The short answer the the question: how often should I update my website? is every 3 to 5 years. The much longer answer starts with: it depends.
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Building a AWS Headless CMS
Over the past several years, Metal Toad has launched several successful cloud-first web and mobile applications, often with hardware components. With each release, I'm noticing how product management, UX, and engineering are frequently able to produce the same features of a CMS faster and cheaper than using Drupal, Wordpress, Salesforce, and Adobe.
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Comparing Drupal, Symfony, and Craft CMS Frameworks
With so many options available out there, it can be confusing to choose the right CMS for your business. When a client came to us with a recommendation from their design partner to build their solution in CraftCMS, we had to pause for a moment. Would CraftCMS be robust enough for their needs?
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Removing batch operations in Symfony Sonata model list forms
When building out a web project in Symfony that needed CMS capabilities, we quickly turned to the excellent Sonata Admin Bundle.
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Full Stack Basics for the Non-Developer
Let's visualize and talk about the "full stack" of web development. From a developer's standpoint, we're probably talking about the layers of code involved in delivering a website to an end user.
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Why More People Select WordPress than Drupal to Build Websites
First off, Drupal has had a great year and a great quarter. According to builtwith.com Drupal is second among all Content Management Systems at 13.75% of the top 10K websites and has added ~250K new website this quarter.
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Open Source is the New Microsoft
When I was starting out in the web industry back before the turn of century, open source options were available but were often ruled out as risky business investments. At the time, they were relatively feature poor (compared to enterprise solutions) and a bet on the wrong technology could potentially cost someone their job. It was around this time that I heard the phrase "no one gets fired for choosing Microsoft", but times have changed.
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New Competition: Will WordPress and Drupal Learn to Share?
After years of building and publishing on them, I'd love to say I knew CMS frameworks like Drupal and WordPress would be this huge. In truth they got this popular because of their great open-source communities; both of which I'm trying to participate and contribute to more. Why? Because closed platforms like SquareSpace and Adobe's content platform are rushing ahead without having to worry about backward compatibility like WordPress and Drupal does. These newer, closed systems insulate users from the backend and abstract away many of the same complexities WordPress.org and WordPress.com solved. They can push forward faster with newer, cleaner, “from-scratch” user-experiences because they don't need to maintain compatibility like "the big PHP" CMS's.
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Why to Drop your Custom CMS for Drupal
A little background.
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Websites Don't Use Carburetors Anymore
It used to be that cars were simple. If your car broke down, a guy could pop the hood, check a few wires, hit things with a hammer and actually get things to go again. Modern car engines have come a long way, and now are a complex system of 500+ components. Gone are the days of carburetors.
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Top 5 Reasons to Choose Drupal as your CMS.
We get a lot of questions about what makes Drupal a good decision as a content management system. Here are the top 5 reasons, in order of importance:
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The Framework is dead. Long live the CMS.
If you don't know already, the framework is dead. That is to say, unless you have money to burn, frameworks like Zend, CakePHP, Django, Struts, .NET, and even Rails should not be considered as a foundation for building anything but the most unique and game changing websites*.
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How to Decide Between WordPress & Drupal
WordPress is great - and so is Drupal. They are different platforms and should be selected for different projects depending on the needs. So how do you make the choice? Here are a few questions you should ask yourself:
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First thoughts of Drupal
Like any good Gen-Y-er, knowing I would be starting a job at a web development company that specialized in Drupal technology, my first step was to Google “what is Drupal?”.