Content Management Systems
A Content Management System (CMS) usually involves...
- completely separating a website's content from its design.
- Content items are filed in a database.
- Visual appearance of the site is controlled through a combination of stylesheets and templates.
- Navigation is automated updated when pages are added or subtracted.
Some advantages of this approach include:
- Allowing folks who may know little or nothing about web design to maintain the content.
- Centralizing control of the appearance of the website.
- De-centralizing content updates.
Disadvantages
- Dealing with the templates tends to be frustrating for folks who
know how to design "regular" web pages, and involves learning some
non-HTML, software-specific things.
Blogs
Primary strength is news: Typically showing the most recent entries at the top of a home page, and automatically archiving entries.
Examples:
Blog assignment
Let's help Kate and Bruck fill in some content for their "S.E.E. Solutions" demo site:
- search the web (or search news.google.com) for an article on one of the site categories, energy conservation, energy generation, or waste reduction.
- Login in to the S.E.E. site, and write up a post: a one paragraph summary of the article.
- Make sure you link to the article somewhere in what you write.
- Add the appropriate categories and any tags that are appropriate.
- Publish your blog entry.
Wikis
Primary strength is collaborative editing. Wikis turn out to be well suited for online documentation projects.
Examples:
Enterprise CMS
Wikis and Blogs are best suited to small groups of people. Larger organizations typically want a system with more fine-grained control of who can edit what.
Goshen College uses Caravel as its content management system.
Examples:
Caravel is a descendant of a system initially used by mennonite.net to host church websites and was written, to no small extent, by student interns here at GC. Caravel has a number of other features, some of which it would share with other CMS':
- Navigation is automatically maintained for you--e.g. if you take away one section of the site, links to that section disappear on other pages.
- A number of tools for special purposes: creating forms, rendering RSS feeds, e-commerce shopping cart, converting MS-Word documents.
Caravel concepts
Since we've been saving directly to the webserver, our changes are live as
soon as we save a file.
In Caravel the act of "saving" content (it's saved in the database) is separate
from "publishing".
- When you save a page, your changes are visible only
to other "logged in" users.
- To make your changes available to the public you need to "publish" the
page, also called taking a "snapshot".
- You can instead set your page to "dynamic" mode. Then, each
time a page is requested, the webserver assembles it on-the-fly from the
many pieces throughout its databases. This can result in slightly
slower response thime than....
- Snapshots of published, static pages can be returned quicker: The "snapshot"
of published pages is saved on publishing as if it were a file, so that
the webserver need not consult it's databases and rules each time the page
is requested.
Uploading MS-Word files
A *very* common task is to take an existing file in MS-Word and somehow get
it on the web. MS-Word's own conversion tends to result in a web page with
Word's design preferences "hard coded" on the web page, rather than letting
your site's style sheets take over.
Caravel has some tools to make this kind of process a lot easier.
Here are current directions for converting
Word content to web content in Caravel.