In Part One of my prototype series, I discussed how I was following the model of Alexander Muse to rapidly build a Web 2.0 prototype from scratch. While Mr. Muse started with an idea and a cocktail napkin, I just merrily started with an idea and a mojito. No, mojitos have no correlation on the idea, but I do wish London bartenders would learn how to make this tasty beverage!

The last few days have had some heady progress. First thing I did was review the competition, which in the case of CMS’s is quite substantial. Its easy to get caught up in the excitement of building a product to the point where you zone out the competition. This is a mistake, nothing you do is totally unique and new, at the same token there is no point in shelving your idea just because it has been done before.

I remember something my old screenwriting teacher used to tell me:

With the exception of The Crying Game, all the unique plots were done by the time of Shakespeare. Don’t worry about trying to do something totally new and grand, just be unique in the way you do it.

Funny thing is, how relevant is a discussion about screenwriting with regards to web development? If you think about it, replace the subject of screenwriting with web development, and the quote suddenly becomes eerily familiar to the chatter you hear from the RAD crowd (ok, save for The Crying Game reference!).

So, understanding the competition is the key to your success, here is a list of just a few tools that I have reviewed:

1. Joomla: I actually use Joomla on a few side projects of mine. Since the break from Mambo, the Joomla team have worked exceptionally hard to break away from the old rigid, ugly markup and have produced a very stable, solid product. Third party support via modules, components, and mambots are quite strong. I personally use a mini-fork called Accessible Joomla, which re-writes much of the common front end components to be valid xhtml and tableless.

2. Wordpress: Ok, so not a classic CMS. However WP enjoys tremendously strong support among the blogging community (including this site), and has really started to move into the Web 2.0 space with the latest release. While corporate’s may shy away from an Open Source product, there is evidence that WP is gaining acceptance at a rapid rate.

3. ModX: Another really strong open source project, though they prefer to call their product a framework rather than a classic CMS. Very strong ajax features in the backend, and a friendly, open community.

4. Eribium: A strong competitor in my quest as it is billed as a ajax-enabled CMS built using the Ruby on Rails framework. Supports tagging, tag clouds, and a slick backend. Project demo page has been down for a while, and the developer has not released his source code as of yet so I’m not sure how on track this project is.

5. Others: e107, Drupal, and CMS Made Simple among many many others.

So I seem to be focusing on the Open Source crowd, well noticed. First off, while I myself am an Architect for a high end CMS/DMS technology (EMC’s Documentum), I am pitching my product lower, specifically to the mid-sized company and below, as well small groups and individuals. Basically, the type of people who want to look big, but don’t want to spend a lot of time getting there.

Another reason for focusing on the OS crowd is the technology. History has shown that new technologies are embraced faster by the techie/open source crowd well before mainstream. This is backed up when looking at my own experience. Large software vendors generally wait until there is customer demand, then they architect it, and then implement that feature into the code. The round trip of that exchange could be 1-2 years depending on the size of the vendor and the request. I’m not saying it will be 1-2 years before we see significant uptake of Web 2.0 technologies and strategies from the big players, but it won’t be next month either.

So, in less than a week, I’ve gotten my idea down on paper, I’ve selected my market, and I have reviewed the competition. Not bad for a full time Architect!

Next post I’ll be sending my Request For Information (RFI) to select few developers and outsourcing teams, to get a bid to build my prototype!