Web Editing solutions for sites with many

[garyp at itd.umd.edu]

Craighton,

Sorry, didn't mean to try and choke off discussion on the issue for
smaller library web sites.  It's just that some solutions (many of the
open-source CMS's I looked at, for example) don't scale up well for large
heterogenous groups of web authors so I kind of wanted to set those aside
as suggested solutions.

Certainly any system where authors have access to raw html code is going
to have consistency and look and feel issues that can only be partially
ameliorated by training, code validators, quality assurance methods, etc.

Contribute has been mentioned by several people. Contribute didn't feel
like the right solution for us due to a number of factors. One was cost,
even with a campus site license it was going to cost $60 a seat to
install.  The main one, though, was that our authors have grown used to
editing web pages wherever they might be (home, the reference desk, at a
lab pc right before they taught a class) and that putting Contribute on
all these PC's were impossible.  Plus permissions are tied to the copy of
Contribute, not to user login, which was also problematic.

[Note: the above is all based on Contribute 2, we haven't looked at 3
yet.]

Combined with the training issues and the work that it looked like was
involved in getting it to generate the kind of code we wanted, we decided
to look elsewhere.  Of course, other solutions are going to have training
and code generation issues as well.

> Topic No. 8
>
> Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 12:23:59 -0600
> From: "Craighton Hippenhammer" <CHHammer at olivet.edu>
> To: <web4lib at webjunction.org>
> Subject: Re: Web Editing solutions for sites with many
> Message-ID: <s2148cff.085 at azrael.olivet.edu>
>
> 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
>
>