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