Reality: Open source CMS integrations are more limited than they appear

Integrating your website with your company’s other software systems—including email service providers, circulation/fulfillment, marketing automation, events, webinars, and advertising—is essential for a modern media enterprise. This holistic approach creates more efficient systems and substantially improves conversion rates.

If your CMS can’t seamlessly handle integrations, you are left with the same processes you had yesterday.

A significant limitation of open source plugins is that integrations are always 1:1. This forces companies with sophisticated needs into four or five parallel and siloed integrations, with zero communication between them. In contrast, ePublishing created a unified five-way integration for a client with their Learning Management System (LMS), order management system, content management system, e-commerce system, and user database. The client’s previous parallel systems had a 20% error rate, which was immediately reduced to zero. This integration provided highly profitable opportunities for the client that were virtually impossible with open source.

Integrations can provide highly profitable opportunities that are virtually impossible with open source.

Customizing multiple open source plugins to make them work together not only adds unexpected cost but inevitably adds unnecessary bulk, which inhibits site performance. The longer it takes a page to render – measured in milliseconds – the more likely people will abandon your site, and the more likely Google will downgrade you.

Reality: Open source CMS does not manage or monetize content

Open source may be called a content management system, but the only thing it actually does is place content on a website. There are no true professional, enterprise-wide management capabilities.

With an enterprise publishing system like ePublishing, content can be both managed and monetized. Valuable content is distributed by writers and editors who create articles once and distribute them directly into multiple channels. Flow content into InDesign templates for print; deliver real-time targeted feeds to mobile apps; automatically send licensed content to syndicators; and automate e-newsletters, integrated with your email service provider.

Reality: APIs for proprietary CMS platforms empower faster, more secure development

Staying ahead of the curve is the hallmark of professional software – and one place where open source cannot compete is with robust, secure APIs. Many companies simply log onto their systems and accomplish everything they need. However, for technical users—or non-technical users who have third parties they want to connect to their systems—an API is the way to go. The more sophisticated and flexible the API, the easier it is to work with, and the more you can accomplish.

The best publishing APIs deliver access to every single underlying data element within a system — including all content types, workflow, e-commerce, directories, media assets, advertising, and user data. You can securely access and track vital user details with simple queries, including subscriptions, article reads, demographics, media views, white paper downloads, event sign-ups, purchases, and more.

The power of the API does not stop there — if you want to integrate third parties or internal systems, you have the ultimate tool to do so. Deliver your vendor a fully published API specification and let them integrate with you, making for virtually limitless possibilities.

A holistic approach, integrating your CMS with your other business systems, is more efficient and substantially improves conversion rates.

A truly robust API puts the headless approach of write once, publish anywhere, directly into the hands of a tech team. With a powerful API and decoupled CMS, this allows you to rapidly pull articles, blogs, publications, newsletters, directories, events, classifieds, products, and their related content into multiple external publishing streams – both online and in print.

APIs, in combination with professionally managed SaaS software, tools, and user support, create the best of both worlds.

Reality: Added CMS plugins mean added complexity

Plugins and custom development allow you to add capabilities to your open source website to make it more than just a blogging platform. But each plugin installed adds a new layer of complexity, conflicts, and risk. Given that the same teams don’t develop plugins and their underlying systems, you can never be confident that they will play nicely with each other. And you won’t know whether they do until you install them, nor whether they will continue to work together each time you update.

Contrast this with the ePublishing SaaS CMS. New features and improvements are baked into the platform – fully system/data-aware and optimized to work reliably with each new platform release and update.

With open source, it can be very challenging to determine who or what is responsible for problems – leaving you with less control.

Reality: More CMS plugins mean less control

With a customized and plugin-driven open source CMS, it can be highly challenging to determine who or what is at fault for the inevitable bugs and problems, leaving you with less control and certainty over security and reliability. Plugins are designed to work well with an open source system’s default implementation. Adding design templates, third-party widgets, and your customizations can introduce unpredictable behavior, slow site speed, or even terminal, website-crashing errors. You won’t be able to count on the plugin author’s technical support. Even with a paid support contract, plugin developers can only certify that their own code works. Functionality with other plugins is not their responsibility.

When you encounter a problem, online forums are your only option for getting help. Sean Breen, CEO of agencyQ, a digital marketing firm in Washington, DC, explains why this is a problem: “As a service provider looking for support for critical digital platforms, I don’t want to depend on the equivalent of begging in the street for answers – that is what support is like with an open source CMS. I want to know that I’ll get a real person that is part of an established company, to support me and my clients’ needs.”

This lack of accountability is just the tip of the iceberg. Abandoned plugins are so common that WordPress has introduced an on-page warning message identifying plugins that haven’t been updated in more than two years. “Approximately half of the plugins in the (WordPress) directory” display this warning, according to an analysis by Addendio Founder Luca Fracassi. It takes a comparatively small amount of time and financial investment to churn out a simple plugin. Most plugins are funded either through upfront fees or by offering it free and then trying to sell your first-party data behind the scenes (beware the fine print).

Plugin developers have a poor track record of staying in business long enough to ensure compatibility with future platform versions or helping dissatisfied customers when things go wrong.

Reality: CMS migration is difficult no matter which system you use

Before you build a new website, you must consider your future needs lest you be faced with the task of starting from scratch when you outgrow your capabilities. This is true whether you’re relying on open source CMS platforms and plugins or whether you’re using a proprietary system. However, purpose-built enterprise SaaS systems like ePublishing have a clear advantage.

Flexibility in serving multiple business models is paramount. If you begin with an open source system, you limit your options from the start.

Most successful publishers have had to expand or change business models to thrive—flexibility in serving multiple business models is paramount. If you begin with an open source system, you limit your options from the start.

Most open source CMS users find the simple act of altering their site’s appearance by changing to a new theme or template can send a website back to the drawing board. Version updates pile up after the initial customizations required to make open source work correctly in the first place, which rapidly creates complexity. This quickly compounds expenses and becomes a manager’s worst nightmare. We’ve seen publishers with so many customizations that their open source CMS could no longer accept essential security upgrades—a trap you must avoid.

Reality: You will likely need to reverse-engineer your website

If extensive customizations are required, continuity from one open source developer to the next is nearly impossible. Your development shop won’t give you their secret sauce that enabled them to bend the plugins to your needs. Even with in-house teams, we have never met a client with an accurate record of every plugin and customization. When you decide to move, the new developers will likely have to do extensive testing through trial and error.

Breen at agencyQ explains why this is problematic: “When you, as the customer, are dependent on the agency or firm that customized the code for the upgrade path, then you have closed off the opportunity to upgrade the system.”

WordPress is functional but not luxurious: Working in it feels kind of like filling in a coloring book. – The Nation, January 2019

For ePublishing, maintaining development continuity and streamlining migrations is a core requirement, with a team of developers working on the same code every day. When you need them, redesigns are very straightforward, with zero lost data, reverse engineering, or performance impact. In the event you must leave, ePublishing makes it easy to import your content into another system.

Reality: In a CMS migration, you end up owning nothing but your content

Some people think that they end up with some type of ownership control of their website with open source – more than with a proprietary system. You don’t. In both cases, all you own is your content. You may own some plugin licenses, but even when you rebuild your site on the same open source platform, you will leave most of your investment behind and start over.

Reality: Open source CMS has surprising hidden costs

Open source is designed to work for the broadest user base possible. You’ll require custom design and advanced plugins if you want functionality suitable for a media organization, information provider, or association. This leads to a marked increase in both your initial and long-term investments. Whether paying for access to premium plugins, using your internal developer’s time, or hiring an outside developer to get the features you need, it all comes at an expense. If you do not invest in custom functionality, the opportunity cost of operational inefficiencies and lost revenue is even higher.

What’s more, you’ll incur an ongoing operational expense in keeping your plugin versions updated and in sync. WordPress alone required a stunning 96 updates from 2016 through 2020. Add plugin updates to that, and the ongoing development work is considerable. One publisher with multiple Drupal sites said updates happened nearly every week. They consider the continuing cost for routine Drupal updates and patches to be “ongoing maintenance.” Sadly, these sunk costs only go to maintaining the status quo instead of propelling the business forward.

Reality: Open source CMS platforms aren’t designed to increase publishing revenue

Online publishing success hinges on your ability to grow revenue through advertising, increase reader engagement, and monetize your content and users. Open source was not designed for these purposes.

A study conducted by PWC’s Digital Services group found that 94 percent of senior executives called personalization “critical” or “important” to reach customers. The ePublishing CMS personalizes the delivery of recommended content based on both demographics and user behavior, increasing your reader engagement. In contrast, open source lacks the infrastructure to collect and store user demographics or behavioral data, let alone leverage it. With this data, you can create substantial cross-selling and upselling opportunities, as well as develop targeted ad packages for a healthy return on your technology investment.

The ongoing cost to maintain the avalanche of open source updates only goes to maintaining the status quo instead of propelling your business forward.

ePublishing clients currently drive diversified revenue in more than 40 different ways. A single system propels lead generation programs, site licenses, buyers’ guides, training programs and CE credits, ad targeting, sponsored content, and dozens more revenue streams engineered explicitly for media and publishing. Having one seamless platform is vastly different than attempting to string these capabilities together with plugins and widgets.

Reality: With open source CMS, publishers are living with “good-enough” solutions built for other industries

More than a quarter of all websites are built on WordPress, by far the most used of open source options. Another 10 percent are built using other open source players like Drupal and Joomla. Just a small percentage of these open source sites are publishers. That means that when you develop your website on open source, you’re relying on a system that looks at publishers no differently than home businesses, service companies, and bloggers. As a result, opportunity costs may be the most significant hidden downside to open source. When a new market opportunity arises, you may have painted yourself into a corner of compromises and workarounds.

In contrast, ePublishing was purpose-built for publishers. Out of the box, it integrates with common fulfillment, advertising, email, and many other systems you use. We understand your business model and have engineered the best CMS for media companies that want to make more money.

Reality: The widespread use of open source CMS makes it a security target

According to iMedia, “With so many companies using WordPress, hackers view the platform as a prime target for massive-scale attacks."

More than 21,000 websites were compromised in just one recent attack when hackers exploited vulnerabilities in three common WordPress plugins. However, site owners’ problems went well beyond unintentional security flaws. 200,000 WordPress websites with the “Display Widgets” plugin were corrupted by the plugin author’s intentionally malicious code, which allowed him to publish spam to users’ websites.

More than 21,000 websites were compromised in one recent attack when hackers exploited vulnerabilities in three common WordPress plugins.

Website security provider Securi analyzed more than 11,000 infected websites, agnostic of the platform. Of those, a whopping 75% were running on WordPress.

According to their analysis, the “improper deployment, configuration, and overall maintenance of infection could be traced to the exploitation of software vulnerabilities in the platform’s extensible components,” including “plugins, extensions, components, modules, templates, themes, and other similar integrations.” In other words, the more plugins or modules, the more vulnerable your site. To keep your website secure, you must keep up (and pay for) regular updates. More than 50% of infected WordPress websites were out of date in the same report, as were a whopping 81% of Drupal sites.

Reality: Open code and slow fixes make open source CMS platforms vulnerable

Plugins, templates, and other customizations represent the most significant security threat to open source CMSs, but the open source systems themselves experience numerous security breaches. Hackers recently used WordPress’s native commenting functionality to inject malicious code and take control of administrator accounts. According to Info Security Magazine, it took WordPress 14 months to release a patch that corrected the vulnerability.

Because the code is available to the public, attacks like these are inevitable. While it is possible to invest in security, open source applications pose substantial risks. According to Business.com, “everyone using the open source code understands how to get around various protections.” The dark web trades in techniques to hack shared open source software. Professional publishing platforms, in contrast, are more secure thanks to their “heavily guarded source code that requires a license in order to access it.”

The dark web trades in techniques to hack open source software. Professional publishing platforms are more secure thanks to heavily guarded source code.

To be fair, open source regularly releases updates to patch known security vulnerabilities, and most of these are prompt once discovered. However, because updating to the latest version may create incompatibilities with existing plugins or other customizations, many open source users forgo or delay these critical updates to keep their site’s functionality intact. This is why, according to Google’s Webmaster Central blog, “even legit good quality plugins and themes can become dangerous if you do not update them as soon as a new version becomes available.”

Reality: Information security should not be left to open source

Hackers aren’t the only risk to your website: Natural disasters and other events threaten to slow down websites or bring them down altogether. Using WordPress as an example, free backup plugins are available, but they typically require you to store those backups on your own server, making you vulnerable. Off-site storage is available via premium plugins or hosting services, but you must pay extra for something that is an included service with a SaaS platform.

Reality: A SaaS CMS is engineered for your business growth

SaaS-based platforms hold many benefits for publishers, not the least of which is scalability. You also profit from the changes made over the years to address the growing pains of hundreds of brands that use the ePublishing system. These media and association brands also drive numerous platform upgrades – incorporated for all ePublishing users via regular updates at no additional cost.

The bottom line: Our clients grow alongside our publisher user base, benefiting from their combined experiences and best practices.

It makes sense that you should seriously consider the pros and cons of open source. While open source CMS certainly has its benefits—simplistic interface and multiple plugins—there are, as with any platform, downsides. As you continue to evaluate your CMS options, include these questions among those you ask potential vendors:

What features do you need in your CMS?

Features are important but don’t limit yourself by starting with a list. Start instead with your ultimate goal: growing revenue, readership, and sales. Ask how you will do that, then look at which features will get you there. Is yours a traditional business model of monetizing content through advertising, or do you take a diversified approach that includes a paywall, directories, advertising, e-commerce, native advertising/sponsored content, and more? Might you need additional capabilities as you grow? How well does the vendor know your business? Are the features you want included in the platform, or is customization required?

Ensure that the platform you choose fits your business model today and can grow with you into the future; you shouldn’t have to adapt your business to the system. And consider the challenges that may come with growth: Does it make sense even theoretically to stake your future growth on a jigsaw puzzle of software built by dozens of unknown sources vs. one robust platform specifically engineered for your needs?

How well does the CMS integrate with your business systems?

To achieve your business goals, the ability to integrate your core business systems is critical. Many publishers are stuck in data silos for subscriptions, newsletters and site registration, lead-gen activities, conference registration, and more. Integrating these will provide a full picture of your audience, allowing for sophisticated targeting and a seamless experience for your users. If your system does not include built-in functionality like e-commerce and fulfillment, consider a single integrated platform’s advantages. What’s the cost, both in dollars and time, for staff and outside development?

What kind of support does the CMS vendor provide?

What can you expect from your vendor or developer when you need sophisticated help regarding advertising, subscriptions, editorial, audience data, and how they can work together for you? When you have a serious problem, can you get help 24/7/365? How long has your vendor been in business? How familiar are they with every aspect of publishing? Will they bring proven techniques for revenue growth? The answers to these questions will give you an idea of how reliable your vendor will be supporting your ongoing development and operational needs.

Which CMS is most secure?

On the security front, you’ll want to address how to protect your website from hacking and spammers, as well as how backups and cloud services are handled.

Can you benefit from the SaaS model?

A cloud-based platform like ePublishing allows you to benefit from other publishers and organizations with similar business models. You receive new and innovative digital functionality added to the system all year long. The SaaS approach means you do not have to pay for version upgrades or fix broken widgets, unlike the constant upgrades and security patches necessary with open source.

How will you measure the ROI of your CMS?

It’s not just the initial cost. Consider the total cost of ownership for the platform you’re using. Include subsequent customizations and ongoing maintenance, such as upgrading versions three to four times a month. Are these included or available piecemeal? Also, consider your team’s resources spent bending open source to your needs if you require multiple customizations. Investing in a publishing-specific CMS such as ePublishing provides dozens of additional publisher-specific features to save your team valuable operational time while providing greater control. Imagine how time saved throughout your organization will contribute to ROI.

Sources for this post are available here.

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