I have a client, the Government Office for the West Midlands. In their building, in central Birmingham, are other, smaller UK Government departments or local sections of larger centralised departments. (I'm not going to name names nor actual departments.)

I have been told of websites that needed content management systems, as most frequently updated websites need these days. However, one site in particular, which has had a content management system written especially for them has me aghast at the waste of public money.

Over the past 4 years that it has taken to write this system, the company developing it has charged around £100,000 each year.

The RSS feed cost £12,000 to develop. To add department or category RSS feeds will cost another £2,000. I could list several simple components that cost this sort of money, for example, It uses a shortcut sytem that that is so tricky to use, that it isn't used. This cost £15,000.

It uses it's own desk top application, which is not user friendly.

I'm not saying that the company developing this platform, for that's what it is, has ripped off or cheated. I believe they have worked hard. Some of the money came from an IT grant (still, public money).

However, out of the box, one Manila site will do 95% of the requirements. While the other 5% can be written, easily, and much of that 5% is merely connecting to a simple SQL database the rest mostly simple web design for the theme. It has a further 50% worth of features (some that I have developed) that aren't in the requirements but would be very handy—the aggregator for example, or the slide shows, thumbnailing and soon rollback (which Userland are developing), scheduled press releases (which I'm developing)...

Each Manila installation can handle, to my knowledge over 1,000 sites, take over 150,000 dynamic page builds per day (though statically rendered pages can take much, much more—obviously).

It's UI is far, far, superior, with 7year old children using quite merrily, it's been around for 4½ years with hundreds of thousands of users, so it's been bug tested to hell and back.

When Radio Userland is connected up to Manila, then you have an out of this world, powerful desktop CMS application. Radio, itself opens up several orders of magnitude of functionality on top of a Manila site's functionality. Throw a developer in there and you'd have more easy to use features than you could shake a stick at.

The list price for a Manila installation is nearly £600 (plus some developer time for that extra 5%). Against nearly £500,000 for a CMS that nobody else will use. What's worse? I know of several other departments thinking they need to spend hundreds of thousands also! There seems to be two reasons: 1) the hard-on of spending so much taxpayer's money, 2) the apparent comfort in thinking, "it must be worth it."

Perhaps I should tender with Manila's functionality yet at a price that's one thousand times more than it's six hundred quid, take an afternoon to install it and use the rest of my life trout fishing.