Rapper 50 Cent (prenouce FIT-TY) actually was singing about CMS developers when he rapped his ‘Ayo Technology’ together. Eventually, Belgium was catching up when Milow graveyarded the song to some ballad, so I think most of you know it. ‘I’m really tired about using technology, I need you to sit in front of me’ is what they were singing and boy… they were right!

Having been around the .NET scene since its early days I have always been looking for a good deployment solution. First, there were those terrifying Windows deployments. Great one-time, but updating? DLL hell as the devs used to call it. Sure, I hear all you C++ and even-more-dinosaur devs ralley about the prehistoric days, but this felt real to us too.

Then, professional web and CMS development finally arrived. Yes, this was it! No more de-centralized deployment! Our dark days were over! Nope, they were just about to start.

As to this day, you can synchronize everything. And then I mean… everything! Just log onto my mobile phone and check the house, my friends across the globe, e-mail, blog posts, website, you name it. Everything is connected to each other everytime, everyplace.
You know what thing can’t be synchronized? Your enterprise all-important-live-sitting-can’t-go-wrong CMS. It relies on programmers to manually update their DTAP (Development Testing Acceptance Live) environment 3 times, sometimes even on different environments and expect nothing to go wrong. And did I mention we should use a pen and paper to register the changes? Or use (Sharepoint) lists for the more sophisticated and fortunate of us. That makes up for this formula:

CMS Deployment = (Developer + List + Testing)³

You could imagine it could become the same mess as the programmer’s desk, although a bug wouldn’t smell as bad as his peanut butter.

Hello! Any CMS publisher listening? The client doesn’t want peanut butter. He wants the topping on the cake. Better start creating that cooking material pretty soon then. And please, don’t forget the cookbook as well.