[Web4lib] CMS or something else?

[K.G. Schneider]

> 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

Ah, making sure content follows style guidelines... I have a feeling that
Tyson meant "CSS," but I first read that as in writing style, which is
something no CMS can help people with. Well, ours has spellcheck and word
count, but after that, the quality of our content comes from the stuff
between the ears of our team members. 

Even if librarians are changing/adding text on a site without anyone running
interference, it's really helpful to have editorial workflow that makes it
easy to see what changes have been done, and by whom... and version control
is pretty nice stuff, too, in case you need to hit the undo button or just
see what changes were made. Internal commenting is nice, as well ("Hey, Joe,
is this what you wanted?"), and so are document statuses, such as draft,
retired, recalled, etc. You might be surprised how much we at lii.org like
having a morgue for retired or rejected content--with built-in statuses for
WHY content was rejected or retired. 

In LII, our workflow does mean that all content is vetted before it goes
live, but it's delegated vetting... something else to consider (instead of a
contributor:gatekeeper arrangement, you could use a contributor:editor model
where there IS some oversight for some contributors, but it's not
bottlenecked in some busy systems office, and above all, IT'S FLEXIBLE) and
the permissions could be adapted to other situations. 

I'm not arguing that anyone use our system-we like it, but we got there via
an extremely circuitous route I wouldn't duplicate-but I'd definitely like
to see the features in our CMS more widely available to others. (Or maybe
Contribute or one of the other CMS's does all this?)

Karen G. Schneider
kgs at bluehighways.com