CMS Nightmares

It's hard to believe that a bad CMS event can cause such a sense of complete helplessness. But you're not alone. Check out other CMS nightmare submissions below.

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SEO Analyst

I want to tell you a story that only few are brave enough to tell. It's a story that would haunt any SEO Analyst's dreams and even drive some into insanity. Want to know the first reason your CMS might have problems? When it takes over 4 years to finish! Customized content management systems might sound enticing to some, but it's easy to be the test subject when the web development company wants to "see if this works" when it doesn't go right. With endless Javascript code from sites like Dynamic Drive littered throughout the site's source code, it was easy to see why it had so many...issues. Even if we had a "stable" platform we could work with, it still couldn't handle many of the SEO capabilities we wanted to implement. We were told that, "it simply wasn't designed to handle these elements and more development would be needed." I started hearing the screeching violins from the shower scene of the movie Psycho playing in the background. "More development!" I exclaimed, "Even the most basic of techniques couldn't be used?! This thing barely functions and now I can't even update meta tags?! Why, WHY?!" After 4 years of excruciating development, there was hope on the horizon. We made a discovery that gave content management systems, the world over, a chance to be useful and powerful again. Although there was a brief stint of post traumatic stress, after moving to Pixelsilk's CMS, my troubles were brought to rest and my faith in sophisticated web development was restored.

Gary Lewis Outdoors

A CMS Incubus in the Age of Attention By Gary Lewis It was November, cold and wet east of the mountains. Gray dawn followed black night. Wind blew sleet like gunsmoke. It was the first day of elk season. An idea blew into the canyons of my brain and clung there like an autumn storm. Forgotten were the elk that drifted like vapor through the trees. Forgotten was the tag in my pocket. A web concept began to take shape. My content could morph and pay me a second time, a third time, a fourth time. My web site could be the engine of change as well as the library from which acquired knowledge would reach new customers. I had been transported in my mind to the land of Internet Possibility. Back home, I clicked up my web site, typed in my admin user name and password. I knew the image my site could present to virtual customers, but the space was limited by a box imagined by an ancient software developer. Like a ladder of possibilities, a web site management menu lay before me, an invitation to a world of departments, categories, sub-categories, links, gallery and a store. At every step, the ladder creaked. Though my intention had been to climb, each rung took me deeper into a basement cobwebbed by semi-colons and brackets and parentheticals. A voice from long ago drifted through my subconscious about how easy it would be to change my content. Later, the same voice reassured about the traffic that would follow. Yet later, the same voice told me my front page would remain static, my look would never change, unless we tore down the house and built it again. Content. It is the quarry that calls to the hunter of information. Perhaps we have moved from the Information Age to the Age of Attention. With my current architecture, my web store is a tower constructed in a basement. In the world of Virtuality, hunters and fishermen – my people – sit over keyboards as they plan future expeditions. Keystrokes and mouse clicks knock upon my door, but silence reigns in my basement store. # # #

geekmum

I had a bunch of Drupal sites and 1 phpfox site at the same Australian host. A Chinese spammer spammed my site, and it broke one of my mods on the phpfox site. It kept crashing. My laptop had just died, so I had no way to debug it. The host turned off ALL my sites due to server load from the crashes. I complained, and they edited the htaccess file to redirect to a holding page for the dead phpfox site. Then somehow they deleted ALL the htaccess files on my account: 12 dead sites. I no longer use that host....