James Robertson takes a stab at busting some CMS myths. First up: Installing a CMS must be hard.

Installing the CMS software can be easy. It should be easy. If isn’t easy, ask why.

During our last CMS selection we required that our web admin be given demos to install from the finalists in our list. That ended up ruling out a couple of companies who couldn’t provide installable code without sending their own engineer over to do it.

Our theory was that if the company had not thought about how to make the initial installation easy then there were probably lots of other areas that had not had proper attention either. I couldn’t find a specific post on his site, but I’m pretty sure I picked up the idea of an effective installer as a sign of quality from reading Joel on Software.