From my Notebook >

Stacey CMS and Purposeful Publishing

Update, January 2013: I can no longer recommend Stacey without reservations. Support is practically non-existent at the moment. If you are considering using Stacey, I would recommend that you either know enough PHP to debug issues between the Twig templating language and Stacey, or have a friend who can help. (End of update)

I stumbled across Stacey CMS while reading Hypertext Hero’s Logbook. I’m pretty impressed at how well-thought out it all is. You save some text files on your web server and you’ve got sections, articles, and a flexible publishing system.

It’s not a publishing style that I would put in front of most of my clients, but for my own work, it gives me some ideas.

I try to keep fresh ideas churning when I’m thinking about managing content, for this simple reason: There is no “best” publishing system.

Each website really deserves an in-depth look at the way its content should be published. For example, David Desandro decided that he wanted every article to be a bit different. He was using a very flexible CMS package in the first place, but he found Stacey and it turns out to fit his custom page needs almost pefectly.

David’s case is pretty extreme. Most people who publish content on the Web simply don’t know enough about the “web” in web publishing to understand why any CMS would fit them better than another. That’s one reason why I really like my job — when you see somebody using a CMS that fits their purposes, there’s this great feeling like you’ve just enabled somebody to become a publisher.