[WEB4LIB] Web Editing solutions for sites with many authors

[Craighton Hippenhammer]

I'd love to see this CMS discussion extended to all size libraries here
on the list.  Even with only a handful of Web page authors, many of the
issues are the same:  design consistency across the site; variable skill
levels; encouraging additional staff members to become Web authors (who
are shying away from the complexity), thereby getting more content
development and maintenance out of the IT office; and site coding errors
that Library IT has to correct.   We're currently using Dreamweaver
templates and CSS to get some control over site-wide design, but as the
number of fingers in the Web pot grows, to say nothing of the sheer
number of pages, the increasing complexity of that growth is worrisome. 
We also have a dozen or so pages that are ColdFusion/MS Access dynamic,
and the number of requests for these dynamic Web development projects
continues to escalate.  Does CMS really provide the answer to all this?

What are the drawbacks to CMS?  A couple of years ago or so, there was
a window of opportunity I had to go with a campus-IT-dept-provided CMS,
but their implementation of it would have necessitated a change in the
library's domain name, and I wasn't willing to make that sacrifice.

Craighton Hippenhammer
Information Technology Librarian
Olivet Nazarene University
Bourbonnais, IL 60914
chhammer at olivet.edu 


>>> <garyp at itd.umd.edu> 2/17/2005 10:22:34 AM >>>

(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
****************************************************************