Content Management System for web/intranet

Mon Oct 15 02:23:02 EDT 2012

Disclaimer: I tapped this out on my phone, and while I tried to catch errors, I'm pretty sure the autocorrect shamed me :). Also, I am soapboxing for Wordpress below (in case you want to skip it :-/).  

I get that Drupal is the going favorite in the community, and I can second/third the recommendations for expression engine (real cool), but Wordpress IMHO is the more robust and user-friendly option. The affordability of expression engine is no more a draw than the affordability--if you don't have a web person of your own--of having the largest design community of the web. If you have a designer on staff, its free. Themes--free and for sale (and again, that is if you aren't interested in developing your own)--are increasingly responsive, and for about $50 you can find a dozen mobile-first* responsive Wordpress themes (or you can use themble.com's Bones mobile-first starter theme if you have your own web person). Content and presentation are separated in all of the CMS's suggested to you already. 

No other CMS has so much documentation or so many (free) tutorials, nor broader extensibility through plugins like buddy-press and simplePress for forums - oh, and wikis. Easy to rig, easy to pickup, and if you need to buy a theme or hire a developer it has the biggest marketplace and the most freelancers.

You can pretty painlessly set up a Wordpress network so you can host multiple websites on a single installation, so you could have a public facing site at www.library.org and an intranet at staff.library.org. 

 We use a Wordpress for automating ticket tracking in systems, generating multiple email newsletters, and some regular departmental web pages so you can pretty much do what you want with it. 

If you're rolling your own, it will take you a fraction of the time to learn than Drupal. The latter would be my second choice, but unless you already have a Drupal dev on hand, commitment to learning Drupal isn't even worth it anymore (that's probably sacrilegious ... ). 

I really think expression engine is groovy, too. But I find that doing web stuff for libraries requires just a lot of jury-rigging for unusual library-only circumstances, and because of that I veer toward the tool that has the most written about it on the web and the most help on StackOverflow. For CMS's, that's Wordpress. 

After all this late-night tapping I would like Wordpress to now cut me a check :-). 

Michael

* Slide deck for future-friendly / mobile-first web design in libraries: www.ns4lib.com/talks/future-friendly

Sent from my iPhone

On Oct 15, 2012, at 1:13 AM, ward smith <wardgsmith at GMAIL.COM> wrote:

> I acknowledge the prevalence of drupal and wordpress (and let's not forget concrete5) in the library community. however, if you are interested and/or need actual content modeling and want loose coupling between your content model and presentation -- and if you want a template model that is flexible, expandible, and is easily manageable, i would suggest that you try out expressionengine. 
> 
> i am a librarian too, "Free Open Source" is great and I am an advocate of it, but human time and staff committment and capabiltiy is a cost as well, and has to be factored into any choice.
> 
> . Best, Ward Smith
> 
> On Oct 14, 2012, at 9:22 PM, Cary Gordon wrote:
> 
>> Drupal is widely used and broadly supported in the library community. You can find information at http://groups.drupal.org/libraries and take a look at the drupal4lib mailing list at http://listserv.uic.edu/archives/drupal4lib.html
>> 
>> There is a great general resource on open-source software for libraries at http://foss4lib.org. This was created by Lyrasis and offers information on many of the content management systems and frameworks used in the Library community. Drupal and Wrodpress seem to be the most popular among the free and open-source systems used by libraries.
>> 
>> I am a librarian and long-time Drupal evangelist in the community, and my company offers Drupal services.
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> 
>> Cary
>> 
>> On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 5:29 PM, ward smith <wardgsmith at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I know it is not open source, but for an institution, even for an individual, it is very affordable, and imho, the best available:
>>> 
>>> htttp://expressionengine.com
>>> 
>>> as far as mobile interface goes, you could use expressionengine as the backend and jquery mobile for the front end.
>>> 
>>> best, Ward Smith
>>> 
>>> On Oct 14, 2012, at 4:26 PM, Anna Wheeler wrote:
>>> 
>>>> oh and of course great mobile accessibility and general usability - front end
>>>> 
>>>> >>> Anna Wheeler 15/10/2012 12:24 p.m. >>>
>>>> Hi
>>>>  
>>>> Just a quick question. We are helping our institution  find a new Content Management System CMS to manage both their website and intranet. Currently they use Shado
>>>> What CMS do you think are worth considering? 
>>>>  
>>>> They would like to use system for intranet and website
>>>> and it will have ability to integrate discussion forums, polls, feedback forums - with voting eg like uservoice
>>>> and it will have some kind of alerting or reporting system to remind us to update information and manage distributed publishers
>>>> good analytics, reporting, content re-use, version control etc
>>>>  
>>>> Any light shed would be appreciated
>>>>  
>>>> many thanks
>>>> Anna
>>>>  
>>>>  
>>>> Anna Wheeler, LLB, DipLibr
>>>> Manager, Electronic Library Services
>>>> Unitec Institute of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand
>>>>  
>>>> email: awheeler at unitec.ac.nz
>>>> ph:    +64 9 8154321 ext 8601
>>>> web:  http://library.unitec.ac.nz
>>>> twitter: http://twitter.com/elibraryUnitec
>>>>  
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
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>>>> 2012-10-14
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>> 
>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> Cary Gordon
>> The Cherry Hill Company
>> http://chillco.com
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