Jon Marks recently ran a CMS haiku competition on Twitter. It had some worthy winners, but the 140 character constraints proved too much of a limitation for other forms of verse.

So, I thought I’d try a sonnet.

Shall I compare thee to CQ5 Day
Complete with JCR? Or to software
Suites from EMC (with FatWire?). Beware!
OpenText Livelink and Vignette make hay

While Sun’s products are now Oracle’s prey.
Alterian markets acronyms. Share
Point and EPiServer are .Net fare.
SDL can’t decide. But should you pay

For a licence? Consider open source
From Joomla, Squiz, Liferay… or Drupal of course.
Just don’t assume that it will cost you less:
Calculate carefully the TCO
Of products that seem free like Alfresco
And if you have no budget use WordPress.

All right, so the pentameter isn’t truly iambic, but it is a sonnet. So I tried this instead:

There was a young man from Nantucket
Who used his CMS like a bucket.
Although his pater
Said “apply metadata”
He just didn’t know where to tuck it.

Some of my haikus were:

Like autumnal mist
Licence costs remain obscure.
What am I paying?

Drupal has Gardens
Cultivated in the cloud.
I share my first thoughts.

Is 5-7-5
A template, a content type
Or metadata?

You can retweet this
Or change it; open source not
Proprietary

Call that CMS?
Where’s workflow and content types?
Just a blogging tool.

Feel free to add limericks as comments.