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. 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.

Caravel CMS

Goshen College uses Caravel as its content management system. 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':

• Editing is done through a web browser.
• 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.

Uploading MS-Word files

Caravel is able to convert the RTF format to HTML. You can add a page to a Caravel site and put the contents of an RTF page onto it like this:

1. Open a MS-Word document,
   
2. Choose "File | Save As" and save an RTF (Rich Text Format) copy of the document.
   
3. Login to the site you're working with.
   
4. Add a new page, and create it in the <page library>
   
5. Add a block and choose Upload File.
   
   
6. Clean up the resulting HTML: Select the text and apply the "undo formatting" button
   
7. Put paragraph breaks into the source code as needed.

Add a picture

Add navigation elements