[Web4lib] CMS or something else?

[John Fereira]

At 04:01 PM 9/1/2006, Tyson Tate wrote:
>On 9/1/06, Andrew Mutch <amutch at waterford.lib.mi.us> wrote:
>>You're kidding, right? No one actually still manages their web site like
>>this do they? With this kind of system, I would never have to worry about
>>job security. If I required all of my librarians to submit their content
>>to me, which I then reviewed for "the proper code and styles", and which I
>>alone, as the "gatekeeper" could add to the site, I could easily fill 40
>>hours a week with work.
>
>I guess it all depends on how valuable your content is to you. Do your
>librarians have the time to be trained in proper accessibility
>practices? Will they be able to follow your style guidelines? Does SEO
>matter for your in-house search tools?

A good flexible CMS should be able to meet all of those 
requirements.  For example, if part of the publishing process 
requires the content go through a pipeline which performs an 
accessibility check, and that check provided useful feedback, 
librarians could quickly learn said practices.  If a CMS uses a rich 
text editor such as TinyMce one can hook the CSS stylesheets into it 
such that content can *only* be formatted using the styles (i.e. No 
<font> tags).


>If everything could be taken care of with a slick CMS, why not just
>buy the CMS, set it up, and then fire the web team? After all, we
>don't need them to maintain the site, right?

When I develop web applications I spend a considerable amount of time 
developing an administrative interface that can be used by our 
librarians to maintain the site.  For example, we just put a large 
scale document repository and distribution system into 
production.  It has a database backend which periodically requires 
updates to handle document metadata updates, deletions, additions, 
etc. as well as managing a patron database consisting of about 18,000 
users.   The SQL code is not that difficult to write but if a web 
accessible administrative can perform the same functionality I don't 
have to spend time writing and executing SQL statements and instead 
can use that time to architect and develop *new* systems.   In other 
words, designing and developing web sites require different skill 
sets than maintaining them or creating content for them.  The less 
time that developers spend maintaining web site the more time they 
can spend developing new ones.

If your web teams only is responsible for maintaining one web site 
they've got an easy job.  In our IT department we're constantly asked 
to design and develop sites for new collections or services.  After a 
few years a developer in our department might have had his/her hands 
in numerous sites currently running in production.  You just can't 
ask developers to continue to add new responsibilities to their plate 
without giving them tools and/or resources (people) to manage the 
sites already on their plate.


>In no way should a "gatekeeper" be spending 40 hours a week on adding
>content. Surely your librarians aren't adding several hundred pages
>per week, are they?

The site I just released adds several hundred pages a day.


>>I would say that well-organized web site with a good CMS and tools that
>>allows authors to add content without messing up the site structure should
>>suffice these days. That old system worked great ... in 1997.
>
>Perhaps you'd like to give examples of CMS's that allow people to add
>content within navigational frameworks which enforce good coding
>standards, maintain a decent level of accessibility (remember, it's
>not only good practice -- it's the law), and makes sure that all
>content follows style guidelines. If there is one, I'd love to learn
>more about it.

Hypercontent will do what you ask and it's open source.  It has a bit 
of a learning curve in how to create and manage a site though.   It 
would require a web team learn new skills that are required to create 
site templates, workflow, construct a publishing pipeline to enforce 
things like accessibility and style guidelines, and integration into 
other systems like directory services.  Once those skills are learned 
though, they can be applied to other sites using Hypercontent.


John Fereira
jaf30 at cornell.edu
Ithaca, NY