Web Editing solutions for sites with many authors

[garyp at itd.umd.edu]

(Speaking of lurkers)

We at the U. of Maryland Libraries have over 150 web authors for our site
(http://www.lib.umd.edu/), of which usually over 100 are active over the
course of a semester.  Editing by these distributed authors is done mostly
on static pages, working directly on the code through the textarea box of
an aging cgi application, or locally through text editors and uploaded
through the same cgi app.  Skill sets of these authors range from highly
skilled to rudimentary.

Our ultimate goal is to have the site inside a CMS, with editing access to
the site regulated by the CMS, and a WYSIWYG editor that keeps authors
away from templates, etc. and generates standards compliant xhtml.

Our main obstacle to progress in this area has been a dearth of dedicated
programming resources.  This has contributed to the fact that a large part
of the site is still static instead of dynamically driven through the
perl/php/mysql and jsp/tomcat avenues available to us.  It has also kept
us from considering building a home-grown CMS up to this point.  This is
changing (we're getting a web app developer added to the team), but
slowly.

My question to the list is, IF you have a large number of authors (say
over 50) how are you dealing with the issues this situation creates?
Primarily we're interested in how your html code gets generated and what
editor(s) you are using.

Is everything stored in databases, content updated through web forms, and
all code generated dynamically? Is this a commercial/open-source CMS or
all home grown?  Is all content edited through web-forms or is there a
browser-based editor you've been able to plug in, like Mozile?

Do you have a Macromedia Contribute-style client side solution?

Do you have a WebDAV-driven solution where every author has access to
their part of the site, and can use Dreamweaver, etc?  How do you handle
code consistency and look and feel issues?

Thanks for any information you can offer.  I'll accept input from anybody,
but am primarily interested in sites where authorship is widely
distributed, and your solutions for dealing with the same.

I am VERY interested if you have implemented any of the open-source CMS
solutions out there (again, VERY interested if you are a large distributed
site).  I am particularly interested in apache lenya, mostly for its xml
underpinnings.

Thanks everybody.  Feel free to email me directly as well.


****************************************************************
Gary B. Phillips               email:          garyp at itd.umd.edu
Web Systems Manager            phone:               301 405 9025
ITD                            mobile phone:        301 318 6902
****************************************************************