CMS Spike

[iteles]

As a Club Soda owner
I would like to determine what the most appropriate CMS is that meets my needs early on in this project
So that there is a low risk of having to change the foundation of the website at a later date.

Tasks

• Initial call review requirements via designs
• Write up requirements list from the call
• Investigate various CMS options
• dwyl team call to discuss options
• Write up recommendation

[Danwhy]

CMS Requirements

• Custom types (venues, brands etc.)
• Structure of pages and resources/types (must support brands 'owning' both drinks and venues and drinks belonging to both brands and venues, though the latter is TBC)
• Simple tagging behaviour for custom types, allowing drinks and venues to be tagged
• Good search functionality, supporting partial searches as well as searches on tags
• Access control - Either:
  • Fine grained CMS access (ie. restrict individual inputs and viewable pages/options) so that venues and brands can be given access to the CMS directly
    or
  • Ability to update pages from outside the CMS (Headless CMS functionality) so that we can build brand and venues logins and forms for updating their information directly into the site
• Image uploads and resizing
• Ability to import data (preferably as csv) for venues and brands
• Ability to export data (preferably as csv) (low priority)

[Danwhy]

Price is something else we will want to take into account when weighing up the pros and cons of each CMS in our recommendation. Some of the options are free, but others will cost (although these will include database hosting, and some do offer free plans for open source projects).

@ctrembath Is there a budget for the CMS?

[Danwhy]

Shortlist of CMS candidates to look into further

• Wagtail - python based

• Apostrophe - node.js based

• Various Headless CMSs - These are CMSs that separate the back and front end, meaning we would have more flexibility in how we display, and sometimes create the data (With some, we are able to upload data to the CMS straight from a form on our site, which would be useful for giving venues access to update their information). Can be used with any backend, or in some cases, no backend.

  • Contentful
  • Prismic
  • ButterCMS
  • GraphCMS
  • Directus

@nelsonic, do you have any initial thoughts on, or experience with, any of the above? Any recommendations of others I haven't mentioned?

[ctrembath]

Hi @Danwhy

Yes there is a small budget for CMS, can you give a ballpark idea of how much it would be per month / year?

[Danwhy]

@ctrembath They range from $15/month to $83/month for the basic plans, which would likely be enough for the MVP, but then scale with amount of data/users. I'l make sure to include cost as one of the parameters in my research though (eg. the $83/month CMS doesn't seem to offer any more features than any of the others, so I probably wouldn't recommend it)

[nelsonic]

I feel like we have approached this with an invalid hypothesis: "determine the most appropriate CMS"
which has lead us to assume that we need a specific CMS for the project to succeed.
What we need instead is an clear understanding of the Critical Success Factors in the project.

The questions we should be asking/answering are:

1. Users?

1. Who are the "users" of the Website?

• The "Piqued Drinker" - someone who is already aware and or has a desire to be more mindful of their drinking. The vast majority users of the website are the "mindful drinkers".
  • Are the drink buyers further segmented?
    e.g: http://howtorunapub.co.uk/uk-pub-customer-demographics-behaviours/
    • Students / "Young & Free"
    • Nesting couples (no kids)
    • Affluent Young Professionals (no kids)
    • Families (with kids)
    • Mums & Dads (not taking kids to pub)
    • "Empty Nesters" (older people whose kids have left home)
• Venue/Pub Owner/Manager - the people for whom incremental patrons (customers) will have a meaningful impact on bottom line.
• Product/Brand Manager
• Club Soda Admin

Do we have a "persona" for each type of user for the Website or at least clearly defined "roles"?
(so that we can write user stories for each one? and can we have a label for each user?)
Are each of these users "active" or "passive" (do they create or simply consume content?) do we want them to create content? (will that drive revenue for Pubs/Brands and "CS")

2. Content?

2. What are the primary content types we want to store for the project and:
   2.a Who is going to input the data for each content type.
   i. will content be initially created by club-soda "core" team and then updated/maintained by the Venues/Brands?
   ii. Is there already a workflow (preferably diagram) illustrating how content is created/updated. If not, can we create/define one?
   iii. what are the "challenges" to making content editable/maintainable by the stakeholders who benefit the most from keeping it fresh/relevant?
   2.b What (micro)format do we want to display the content in to maximise it's usefulness
   both to the target end-users and search-engines.
   2.c How will the content be kept "fresh" (relevant) so that search engine spiders
   give it a higher ranking than competing content?

3. Secondary Content?

3. What are the related (secondary) content types for each of the primary content types.
   For example:

• Product ratings/reviews?
• Venue ratings/reviews?
• Event rating/review? (e.g: Mindful Drinking Festival https://mindfuldrinkingfestival.com/mindful-drinking )
• User Images? note: we do not need to store the images, we could simply store a reference to them e.g: link to the Twitter/Instagram post where the drink/venue/event was tagged/mentioned.

4. Data Storage? #85 (Database Setup)

4. What is the most effective way of storing each content type?
   e.g: is a Document Database best? or a ("traditional") Relational Database?
   do we need "flexibility" or "consistency"?

https://www.getthedata.com/open-pubs >> open_pubs.csv.zip (Sample) Last update: August 2018

5. Metrics?

5. Which Metrics to Track? Page Views vs. Engagement and Action?

Is the objective of the Website to get more page views? or to help people change their behaviour?
Viewing the page is the first step, but it's not in itself a good metric to focus on.

A much better metric would be to track "completed actions" of the user journey through the website. e.g:

• a prospective mindful drinker (MD) "lands" on a specific product ("landing") page after searching for a specific beverage on Google: "Peach Bellini Mocktail" (insert name of real drink here!)
• The website detects that the MD is on a mobile device and asks: "would you like to find a venue near you that stocks this drink?"
  • Request access to device location http://diveinto.html5doctor.com/geolocation.html
  • Show postcode lookup input. (Dan has built this for TC before)
• Display list of venues which stock/serve this drink.
  • Bonus Level: show [view on map] link next to each venue in list.
• User clicks on [view on map] link
• User visits venue
• User leaves a review for the product and/or venue

Do we have stats for the annual expenditure of mindful (or non-alcoholic) drink consumers? e.g:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/597628/average-total-spend-per-year-in-pubs-uk/

What are the "biggest concerns" for the Pubs? (what keeps them "up at night"?)
And how can we help them to be successful instead of going out of business?
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-43492043

Note: I'm not suggesting that "success" for a pub is selling people more alcohol.

We should seek to understand the following metrics:

• Who are the most loyal customers ("regulars") and do they drink alcohol more often than non-alcoholic drinks?
  • Are they tracking the increase/decline in these regulars?
• Who are the new customers driving new demand/growth?
• What is the percentage of sales of Alcoholic drinks, Non-Alcoholic drinks, food (meals) and snacks?
  • What is the profitability of each product category?
  • How are these product categories growing/shrinking?
• Do people drinking non-alcoholic drinks spend more or less on snacks/food in the venue?

Feedback Loop?

• How many of the various types of users are signed up to receive the CS newsletter?
• How many of the users are regular/repeat visitors to the website?
  • What is the percentage of people who visit once and do not click on any call-to-action?
  • How many visits per month is the average?
• Do users give feedback on products which can be "re-packaged" and passed on to the brands?

Note: this is a non-exhaustive list; it's a "starting point" of the questions we should be seeking clarity on so that we have a "SMART" goal for the project (beyond "build a CMS website").

[iteles]

Thank you for these @nelsonic, they'll be very enlightening. We have a good view of content types for example, but it will be very useful to have these catalogued here and we have discussed very little on metrics so far. 👍

I have split these out into their own issues (linked above) for clarity of further discussions.