[Web4lib] Create a customizable homepage/site?

[Caitlin Nelson]

Hello web4lib,

This is my first post, so please forgive me any mistakes...  My name is Caitlin Nelson and I'm currently an LIS student at the University of Hawaii.  The student Web Team is currently in the process of a major redesign of our Program website: current site: http://www.hawaii.edu/slis  new site draft: http://wwwdev.hawaii.edu/slis .  

Right now we are not using a CMS; we are using a combination of hard-coded HTML and PHPincludes to create "templates" for our pages, as well as using PHP for dynamically generated navigation. Essentially we're creating our own system of managing the bits and pieces of the pages so we can splice it all together to make a coherent site.

Now, if that were all we wanted to do, I would feel okay about continuing on as we are, but being young idealistic dreamers we keep coming up with "wouldn't it be great if..." ideas that we'd like to implement. The main example being "Wouldn't it be great if we could have a customizable site, where the person could login and have access to personalized information like bookmarks, rss feeds, course schedule, wikis, etc all right on the homepage?"

So, my question is: how do we move from the idea stage to the implementation stage? What kind of skills and software do we need in order to make this (customized page/site) a reality? Once we know more about how something like this would actually be implemented, we can evaluate the current skill-set of the team and decide if that's something we can actually accomplish or not.  I have superficially investigated some CMSs like Joomla and Drupal and have paid close attention to the discussions on this list about the topic, but still am not sure if something like a CMS would be a good way to implement these features. 

Basically, we're ready to learn what we have to in order to make it happen, but I'm just not sure where to begin.  Any ideas, advice, information will be great - thanks!

Caitlin Nelson
LIS Student UH Manoa
http://caitlin.childcarepub.net