A website by Richard Feich

A Content Management System (CMS) is a tool to help you to manage (create, edit, organize) content of a website. You can build your own or use one of the thousands of systems available pre-built; some open source [free]…some proprietary [$$$].

One thing for sure, there is no one CMS that has it all…it’s always a matter of finding the right tool to do the job at hand. A small business brochureware website has different requirements then an enterprise portal–that’s obvious. However, granularity of choice is much finer.

If the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.

A good development team should be well-versed with a number of tools [CMS] used to build websites. An excellent resource for exploring and comparing Content Management Systems is CMS Matrix:

 http://www.cmsmatrix.org/

They currently have 789 systems to study and compare. CMS Matrix is only a starting point to find the right CMS tool.  You’ll still need to do your due diligence with research and demoing products. You MUST demo any products being considered…it’s a requirement for so many reasons.

Welcome to a new development phase of my website at feich.com.  I decided to retire the old website and install a personal publishing system to allow me to maintain and update this website in a more timely fashion. I’m using a customized version of the very popular Wordpress…which I like very much. What is Wordpress? Here is a good description taken from the official Wordpress website:

Wordpress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

 I like Wordpress because it’s easy to use and customize, there are tons of themes and plugins available, and it has good support. Wordpress is really a Content Management System (CMS) geared towards blogging, however it can easily be configured for other purposes. In the last two years or so I have evaluated dozens of Content Management Systems…probably more then 35. I have used and extended many systems, and built a few as well. With this experience behind me, I selected Wordpress as my personal publishing platform.

I will continue to discuss the merits of Wordpress, as well as other CMS’s in later posts.

The Bean of Chicago

This is insanely good! Beurre Blanc sauce is a relatively simple butter sauce  that is excellent on grilled fish, seafood, or even roasted corn…yes that’s right, roasted corn. Last Friday, we roasted locally-grown  [Illinois] in-season sweet corn over hardwood, accompanied by grilled fresh Coho salmon filet’s. The fish was good, but the corn was fantastic; especially with a drizzle of Beurre Blanc sauce.

Beurre Blanc Sauce Recipe:

1. Place 3 tablespoons each of white wine vinegar and dry white wine in a small saucepan with finely chopped shallot (1 to 2 tablespoons); white onion or the white of green onion will work as well.
2. Bring to a soft boil and reduce to about 1 tablespoon in volume.  Remove heat.
3. Cut up 1 stick of unsalted butter (1 cup) into cubes. Whisk in one cube at a time. Let each peice be absorbed before adding the next.  Season to taste and serve immediately.