redesigning lclark.edu

Content Management Systems

CMS — What it should be? (Or, should it be?)

In a site the scale of any major college/university, the real difficulty for new media is helping people connect the dots to different kinds of information that already exists on the site. Often, the left hand in one area of the institution doesn’t have the time to keep up with and know that there might be valuable information for them in another’s site (the right hand), and they end up duplicating the work, if it’s that important to have it available.

And, while we in new media can help connect some of those dots, and often do, it would be far faster and more robust if there were a more automated method of doing this. So, Noah and I were just talking about this and some other issues — thinking out loud about ways to see the website (and management of it) work better — and I was particularly enamored with the following idea.

What if the future CMS allowed people to tag (in exactly that Web 2.0 methodology) certain types of content (images, audio, video, text blocks, RSS feeds, etc.) or whole pages with tags, perhaps from a defined set. Further, they could set a scope of availability that might include academic-only, or select portion of the site only, or, available anywhere on lclark.edu.

Website editors could then sign up to follow certain tags with email notification or by RSS feed to be alerted when new content appears that is relevant to their site’s mission. (They would also be able to search on the tags at any time.) Other types of information would be automatically built into this system, such as alerts regarding news stream by tag and events by tag.

If the tagged element is a bit of content, as in a audio file, the site editor could then choose to absorb the material into their site (not by duplicating the original content, but merely distributing it to an additional location). In this manner, if that content changes in the future, like the tuition numbers which change annually, any page absorbing that content would automatically be using the most updated and accurate version.

While talking about this, Noah did remind me that Trillium does actually use a good base for this methodology. In Trillium, blocks of content are assembled to make pages, and within an account/site, you can re-use a block as many times as you like. What I’ve outlined above would require an extension of that methodology, so that accounts/sites could share their blocks (and a notification system to help manage that process).

Thoughts?

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Assessment

As I’ve mentioned before, the primary step we are undertaking in the redesign is to assess our website in all its aspects so that we can determine the best course moving forward. To this end, we will be hiring one or more consulting firms to give us good advice about what they think our strengths and weaknesses are in light of our goals. While this list is by no means fully inclusive, here are the major elements we will expect them to address:

  1. back-end systems: do we have the right mix of hardware, software, skill-sets, and training?
  2. trillium: what future does our cms have?
  3. information architecture: how should we alter our information architecture to better standardize it across the entire website?
  4. visual design: we need to make our website more compelling and bring it into alignment with the strategic marketing initiative, what should it look like?

As part of the process we will also be specifically asking the consultant to interview representatives from many of the major constituencies across, and outside of campus, from prospective students to alumni, students, faculty and staff from each college, and college leadership. And the design process must include usability studies to make sure that our next website is easy to use.

Dan Terrio, Tom Krattenmaker and I have formed an ad hoc committee to put together a list of potential consultants, based on past work and the references provided by other institutions that have also undergone this process. With Dan and Tom’s oversight, I will be writing a Request For Information that will be sent to our short list of consultants capable of handling this level of work.

We are still in the investigatory stages, so it’s too soon to report further now, but I’ll report more in the coming weeks.

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UC Davis CMS Survey

This is a very interesting survey:

Today, the Requirements and Evaluation committee of the UC Davis Web CMS initiative posted results from an online survey of campuses completed last month.

The survey was conducted to collect comprehensive data about the adoption and use of Web content management systems among institutions of higher education…

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Blogging Software? Why not Trillium?

We are utilizing blogging software to manage this discussion. By now, I suspect most people understand the concepts and functions surrounding a blog, and in fact on a small scale, blogging software can be a replacement for a content management system (CMS), which is what Trillium is, in that both assist in the management of web content.

So the question that perhaps strikes you is why did we not build this site in Trillium, if it’s a CMS and we know it inside and out? Practically speaking, while Trillium is good at many things, it does not handle the automated functions involved in blogging and podcasting without a significant amount of work. We were looking to create this informational space quickly and without much fuss — this software was the fastest means to this end.

Further, it utilizes open standards for the storage of its content, so if we choose another product, even the future Trillium, into which to move this all this at some later date, it will be a simple rather than complex task. For want of a better mantra, it is as simple as that old saw your grandparent might have taught you, “Use the right tool for the job.”

Separately, we are in fact at a crossroads with Trillium and are beginning the assessment process which will take us into a complete rebuild of Trillium, or away from it to some other CMS product. New Media is also currently building a new news and podcasting site with the same software for Public Affairs and Communications; it will give us good opportunities to test and identify features and functions important for any future CMS software.

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Content Management Systems (CMS) and Trillium

What is a CMS?

A content management system, or CMS, is currently the best technology to assist any large organization with the management of its web presence. While there are other advantages, at its core, a CMS possesses two important features:

  1. the ability to distribute the authorship and management of sub-sites and/or individual web pages across the organization in a manner which does not require a significant knowledge of all the acronyms of web development; and,
  2. it allows for easier re-distribution and re-purposing of all kinds of content, sharing if you will, of the content in a dynamic manner.

An example situation of the above two advantages could be phrased as follows: the events calendar is the central location for all events. However, in the case of a specific lecture, we might want to see it in the main events calendar, but also be able to give one or more department sites the ability to display it, or perhaps a student group might want to see the event listed on their site.

In both sites, it is the site editor’s choice as to what content they choose to form the messages that their site delivers to the community at-large, and they both have the opportunity to share information, without any duplication of work.

Trillium

While Trillium does not easily share content, it is in fact a simple CMS. Trillium grew up out of the same need to distribute authorship that has since created what is now the CMS industry. What has happened since that time, is that Trillium hasn’t kept up with the industry, and many of the features that are available in open source and commercial software are missing from Trillium. As such, Lewis & Clark is at a crossroads with the management of its web presence and has the opportunity here to choose which road to take.

CMS Assessment

To find the best route, there will be a full assessment of our content management system. At present, Trillium is meeting many of the current daily needs of our web site editors, but lacks a number of administration tools and does not adequately incorporate current nor future technology. (This is not surprising, since the Trillium core was written before the wider acceptance of open standards.) This assessment will help us determine the best course of action moving forward. All options are on the table, but the most likely avenues include:

  1. rebuilding Trillium from the ground up adding additional features — this is essentially creating Trillium version 2.0;
  2. utilizing an open source CMS and building L&C modules atop its framework to customize it to our use; or,
  3. purchasing a commercial CMS, and again altering it to our use.

In each of the above cases, there will be a balance formed between the explicit up-front costs (as in commercial software) and the implicit post-purchase costs (all of the avenues) of both importing and deploying the CMS.

With both the open source and commercial avenues, we may have additional resources available, as in a community of developers or other colleges and universities that have already created add-on software modules that we can use/adapt.

CMS Goals

To adequately assess any CMS, we will need to form a prioritized list of goals, features, or functions that will help us determine the correct direction. While not yet created, it will include such items as: the ease-of-use the CMS provides to individual web site editors, the ability to handle new forms of content, like podcasts, and use open standards, so that we know we can adapt it in the future to the “hot” communication vehicle yet-to-be.

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