website options

[Laura Robbins]

If cost is an issue, then you could investigate using a wiki, like pmwiki.
Pmwiki is php based and you can customize templates for a standard look.
We use that for part of our website.  You could also look at SubjectsPlus.
It's an open source alternative to LibGuides that handles course guides,
database pages, staff pages, and an FAQ.  We're going to move to that very
soon.  Right now our site is a mix of static pages, database-driven pages,
and wiki pages.  SubjectsPlus will allow more folks to be involved in
maintaining the site.

Laura Pope Robbins
Professor/Reference Librarian
Dowling College


On Sep 29, 2015, at 9:39 AM, "Haitz, Lisa (haitzlm)" <haitzlm at ucmail.uc.edu>
wrote:

I think some of your choice may depend on who is using your site to update
content. For example, we have 50 editors on our site.  I alone manage 42
sites by myself.

Are you the only one on your site doing updates? if so, a static site might
work for you. If not, you will be better of with a CMS.

We have our main site on Adobe Experience Manager (university Provided),
extensive Guides on Campus Guides CMS, as well as about 25 or so blogs and
exhibits on two different installs of Networks of Wordpress (sometimes
called Wordpress MU).

Why do you not want to use Wordpress that your University supplies? Is it
too locked down? Will they give you admin control of the site?

We survived for years using Dreamweaver templates and Server Side Includes,
so a template based php system might work for you. Though I have used it
for years, I too have been reluctant to go to Adobe s cloud services.

As someone else pointed out, if you University is supporting Wordpress,
then they are supporting PHP!


On September 29, 2015, at 3:30 AM, Christian Pietsch <
chr.pietsch+web4lib at GOOGLEMAIL.COM> wrote:

Hi Shannon,

dynamically generated websites have turned out to be terribly brittle,
slow, and insecure. Current HTML5 is so powerful that for most use
cases, you don't really need them. Not even for blogs.

I would always first try to use a static website generator such as
Jekyll <https://jekyllrb.com/>, which is free and open source.
It allows you to author blog posts in Markdown which is essentially
plain text with very unobtrusive markup like people use in e-mails.

Cheers,
Christian

On Mon, Sep 28, 2015 at 11:53:38PM +0000, Shannon E. Fox wrote:
> A year later we still have not solved our dilemma of what to do for the
next iteration of our academic library website. If we migrate to the
college website WordPress-based CMS, we lose functionality that we prefer
to keep. Hosting solutions are too expensive for our tight budget. We
prefer not to rent Dreamweaver from Adobe Cloud. I began looking at open
source solutions besides Drupal and similar ones that require technology
our IT department is unwilling to support (PHP, ASP.net, etc.) on the
webserver they host for us (java is okay on it  but not in the WordPress
CMS). I see that there are numerous open source and low-cost alternatives
and the selection is overwhelming. Has anyone on this list employed a low
cost html editor or responsive design software package to create/maintain
an academic library website? I have an old version of Dreamweaver that is
becoming "glitchy" and I prefer to redesign our website with modern coding
and responsive design.

-- 
  Christian Pietsch · http://purl.org/net/pietsch
  LibTec · Library Technology and Knowledge Management
  Bielefeld University Library, Bielefeld, Germany

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