The best-rated CMS for magazines, blogs, and editorial content
July 07, 2015

The best-rated CMS for magazines, blogs, and editorial content

Sophia Ahn | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Movable Type

We had two CMS used by our fashion publication - one was an in house, custom made CMS which was clunkier but more flexible with back end coding, and the other was Movable Type, which we used for our shorter, newsier blog posts since content was easy to build for producers, and even editors and freelance writers who weren't well versed in web production.

Pros

  • Easy to use straight out of the box, very user friendly with an intuitive interface.
  • Great for team use where there are multiple editors and writers fixing and editing each other's works. It's easy to track who last made the latest edits.
  • Stellar support team and system. I've found that Moveable Type's support system is generally more responsive and helpful than WordPress.

Cons

  • Very difficult to tamper with back-end coding, which is why we had a separate CMS for our bigger articles and interactive content.
  • Limited number of plug-ins compared to other popular CMS like WordPress or Drupal.
  • Not as media friendly as I would like. Movable Type was VERY finicky with embedding video and images. Constantly had to resize images and mess with video size to make sure it would display at the right size on the website.
  • Because of its simple UI it is THE platform for any quick blog posts that need to be made by end of day.
  • Similarly, editors and freelance reporters who might not be web-savvy can be trained in the CMS in 5-10 minutess, and they can build the simpler posts which means the workflow really sped up for the web production team.
  • Because it's easier to spot problematic comments, and set up certain types of comments to be flagged for the admin, it was easy to keep the site clean(er) of trolls and spammy discussions.
  • WordPress,Vanguardistas,TeamSite,Ektron Web Content Management System
WordPress and Movable Type are the go to CMS for a reason - they are by far the easiest to navigate, learn, and use for daily blogging/content management. And now with more plug-ins available, these CMS products are getting more responsive and are offering capabilities (even basic things like tweeting about the story as it gets published) that integrate other platforms and capabilities into one place. As I mentioned before, if you want to make custom pages and build out any code heavy articles with extensive, multimedia pieces, then these easy to use CMS platforms won't cut it. But there's a reason why most publications are switching over from their huge, bulky CMS to these two competitors. For a team of varying web production skills, these are the perfect CMS solutions.
For the purpose of simple, day-to-day blogging, Movable Type will get the job done. As I mentioned before, it has an intuitive UI so that most beginners can pick it up and build a simple blog post. But if you're looking for a CMS that will host multimedia content, interactive content, or any "fancy" production that goes beyond paragraphs and bullet points, then I would recommend something different - maybe even a custom CMS for the maximum control over your website's back-end coding. Keep in mind that the CMS does have some quirks and can be finicky, but the support staff is extremely helpful and available.

Movable Type Feature Ratings

WYSIWYG editor
9
Code quality / cleanliness
6
Admin section
8
Page templates
5
Library of website themes
3
Mobile optimization / responsive design
8
Publishing workflow
9
Form generator
3
Content taxonomy
9
SEO support
6
Bulk management
3
Availability / breadth of extensions
3
Community / comment management
7
API
6
Internationalization / multi-language
Not Rated
Role-based user permissions
5

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