Jeffrey Veen has written an aricle on open source content management software at Adaptive Path that echos many of my own thoughts. I will not go so far as to agree that the software is useless, but he does make some valid points. Perhaps I can address his statements with regards to Drupal, the CMS I use.

Make it easy to install

Ok, you have got us there. Jeffrey wants to run an installer. I install Drupal by using PHPMyAdmin, and the instructions that come with Drupal do not even provide for that much user friendliness. Shell access maybe? Beats me. Anyway, I just ignore the database instructions that come with Drupal. I upload the database.mysql file from my hard drive through PHPMyAdmin and I am good to go. This is exactly the way I like it. Maybe it is the fault of installer scripts I have used, or maybe I don't pay attention when I run them, but I almost always guess wrong on one or more of the questions and have to delete everything and run the script again. And again. Just give me a simple upload and be done with it. Drupal has this part right.

If an installer is really what you need, you might try Civic Space, a form of Drupal optimized to support grassroots organizing and civic activity. You will still want to become familiar with PHPMyAdmin if you wish to install additional modules :-)

Make it easy to get started

This is the subject of my NEXT post. In a nutshell, once your Drupal site is installed and working, and you have created the first account, procede directly to the "create content" link in the sidebar. You will be given a choice between blog entry, page, story, and possibly forum topic. Choose an option at random; blog entry and page are excellent choices. Then type away. Your new content will not have a category, but you can add one later. You can see what Drupal does with your post and gain some clues about how you want your site configured.

Write task-based documentation first

Once again, see my next post. In the meantime, you may find some help in the tutorials in the Bryght User Guide. Drupal is endlessly configurable but a few pointers on how to set up the most basic working arrangement would be helpful.

Separate CMS administration from the editing
 and management of content

I think Drupal does well here. You can log in and create content to your heart's content without ever touching the admin area.

Users of a public Web site should never,
 never, be presented with a way 
 to log in to the CMS

Drupal's focus is on being a community website so the login form is by default on every page. I am of the opinion that most folks who install Drupal are using it as a one person operation but they may require membership for commenting. If you wish to hide the login form you can log in to your site at example.com/user/login/ for those who have enabled clean URLs and example.com/?q=user for those who have not. Disble the form by unchecking the User Login option under administer >> blocks. You can also set permissions under administer >> user >> configure to disallow visitors from creating accounts.

Stop it with the jargon already

Ok, Drupal is moving away from the word "Taxonomy" and has adopted the word "Categories". Personally I liked taxonomy, but there were complaints. Other than that, blocks are the things that run down the side of your content, for example the login form is a block. Modules provide various functions for your site. Examples of modules are the blog and the forum component. Each of these modules does a different thing and you probably won't use them all. The other features are similarly named, no cutsie stuff.

Why do you insist Web sites have “columns”?

Well, websites are basically column-shaped. Even if there is only one column, it is still a column.

Drupal can be styled to use only CSS for layout. It is still not easy to do, but the coders are moving in that direction.

CMS Clean Up

It is rarely a challenge to guess the CMS used on any site you may be visiting. Drupal is a good starting point in developing this pastime, if you are looking at a blue header with gray down the sides, it just might be Drupal. On the other hand, Drupal may well be the easiest CMS to camouflage, and this seems to get easier with every release.