A web design company's experience using several content management system tools meant it could offer useful feedback to a provider tweaking version 3.0 of its own CMS product.
Shift, which has offices in Wellington and Auckland, says it prefers to align with technical partners rather than develop and support standalone applications. This preference has resulted in the firm working on projects with CMS from Microsoft, Vignette and Straker, and providing input into the latest version of e-cision's CMS, WebNovo 3.0.
Shift creative director Che Tamahori says because Shift is "not beholden" to any one provider and tends to opt for "design-heavy CMS" to prevent sites looking too similar, the company exchanged ideas with e-cision's designers on its product's interface.
Tamahori says WebNovo is a flexible tool with a strong architecture, and because it is a native Java product, performance gains can be had from using it in certain web development. He also likes the company's aim to create a "turnkey, out-of-box experience" for CMS that's less focused on a customer's back-end systems. He says Shift looked at creating its own CMS but prefers to leave the support and updating of such products to its partners.
E-cision says as well as an improved user interface -- thanks to the help of Shift -- WebNovo 3.0 offers a clipboard feature that allows restructuring of pages and sections using a model similar to the "cut and paste" of many desktop applications. This should greatly ease the workload of site designers and editors. It also promises a sophisticated workflow system that can be implemented independently from the CMS and use to manage business processes and prototyping.
E-cision says WebNovo is already in use at IStart and Telecom's Boost mobile division.