[Web4lib] CMS or something else?

[Keith D. Engwall]

I absolutely agree... I suggested as much.  However, our Director is concerned that if I'm on vacation or out of commission, there be a way for someone to put something up.  Right now, I'm the only one with expertise in vi and linux command prompts, so his concern is valid.

I'm hoping to find something that gives one or more people a chance to preview/approve the content.  Otherwise, I'd just have them publish to a development version of the page, and then have an easy way to copy the dev page over to the production environment.

I mean, there's Contribute, but that's pretty pricey.

Keith

-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org [mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org] 
Sent: Friday, September 01, 2006 3:06 PM
To: web4lib
Subject: Re: [Web4lib] CMS or something else?

Be careful with allowing librarians to edit and add content. It's not that they're incapable, of course, it's that having a wide array of people with varying experiences with web content and organization can lead to a poorly organized and poorly coded site. They're certainly capable of creating valuable and useful content, but it's much better to have a "gatekeeper" who prepares content for the internet.

This gatekeeper should be a web person who has a firm grasp of the organization of your site as well as the ability to use the proper code and styles to make new content fit in with the design and standards of your overall site. They'll be able to keep track of content and remove old content when needed. Perhaps you don't even need a CMS. You may simply need an organized system of allowing librarians and other staff members to submit content for translation to your web site. They could submit Word documents through a web form which allows them to specify where they want their new content to go.

-Tyson

On 9/1/06, Keith D. Engwall <kengwall at catawba.edu> wrote:
> Our director has requested that we look into providing some way for 
> librarians to add content to our web site (http://www.lib.catawba.edu).
> On one hand this is pretty much in the realm of CMS, but I would like 
> to find something that works behind the scenes, rather than something 
> with the content management controls right on the page.  In other 
> words, I want the staff to be able to log into a back end interface 
> that allows them to add/edit files, while the front end is good ol' 
> XHTML/CSS, same as what I'd put up using vi on the server itself.
>
> I've looked through the CMS matrix, but thus far have not found quite 
> what I'm looking for, and I'm not sure that a CMS is quite what I'm 
> looking for.
>
> Any suggestions would appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Keith
>
> ---------------------------------
> Keith Engwall
> Head of Library Systems and Technology Catawba College Salisbury, NC 
> kengwall at catawba.edu
>
> "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public 
> relations, for nature cannot be fooled." - Richard P. Feynman
>
>
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