Web Editing solutions for sites with many authors

[Rick Wiggins]

Kent State University Libraries & Media Services has developed a CMS 
for our staff to use in building pages for our public web site 
(http://www.library.kent.edu).  All page content is dynamically 
generated when viewed.  This is a home-grown system build on 
Apache/PHP/MySQL.  We use two WYSIWYG editors, Editize and DevEdit, 
that we purchased for this project.  We currently have 56 content 
providers on this system.

Some interesting features of our system are:

- Pages are composed of one or more sections of content.  The types 
of sections currently supported are: text & image, table, form, page 
index, resource index, embedded object, and calendar.

- Controlled vocabulary is used to categorize the pages -- both our 
home-grown functional vocabulary and LC subject terms.  An 
uncontrolled special terms field is available primarily for page 
index use.  Page index sections use these terms for dynamic page 
index generation.  The Site Index is dynamically generated using the 
controlled vocabulary terms.

- All links are verified every night.  This includes text content 
links, table data links, and resource links.  Content providers are 
notified when a link has been broken for five days.  Links to pages 
on our site cannot be broken since a page cannot be deactivated if 
another active page is linking to it.  Images and files cannot be 
deleted from our site if they are referenced by an active page.

- No HTML tables are allowed in text content.  Data tables can be 
included on pages by the creation of an actual database table (using 
the CMS) and then including a table section which describes how this 
data should be displayed.  The database tables are reusable by all 
content providers, so lists of information that might appear on 
multiple pages can be stored once.  This makes updating the 
information much simpler.

- Form sections allow a content provider to create a form based on 
the fields in a database table.  When a patron completes a form the 
responses are stored in this database table.  The form data can be 
optionally sent by email to multiple email addresses.

- A large amount of metadata is maintained for resources, including 
relevance to specific departments or specific courses.  Any of this 
metadata can be used to specify resource index sections.  Resource 
index sections are dynamically generated based on this metadata.

We created this system with two programmers in about eight months. 
Our staff converted most of our old web site to the CMS in about four 
months.  We went live with the new site in August 2004.

There is no way for us to allow outside people to use our CMS since 
it is built into our intranet, but I would be happy to answer any 
questions that people might have...

-- 
Rick Wiggins
Kent State University
Libraries & Media Services