Choosing the Right CMS

Choosing the Right CMS – Jeff Wisniewski

Jeff starts the presentation with a discussion of the workload of web maintainance. The open part of the talk was terrifically entertaining and funny. He provided a overview of the core functionality of CMSs.

• Creation: Every CMS provides an interface through which writers (content owners) can add, edit, delete content.
  
  lots of variation here. Some system are set up so users don’t need to know HTML at all.
• Management: Every CMS proves some degree of permissioning/security, version control and archiving.
  
  Lots of granularity in permissions of these systems.

• Presentation: Every CMS cupports stylesheets and templating
  
  Helps with maintaining compliant and clean code as well as scalable redesign
• Publishing – can give people different publishing permissions so that content can be reviewed. In some systems you can schedule content to be rolled out.

Advanced CMS functions

• Support for multiple delivery channels
  • XML, RSS, HTML, WAP
• Integration with existing directory servers for permissioning
• Search capability
• APIs
• Reporting
• Update Scheduling

What objectives do you have? Why do you think you want to implement a CMS? There are several reason why you would want to implement a CMS: distributed environment, frequent updates, web master overworked.

Choosing the Right CMS: Using Mambo- Cheryl Stenstrom

Cheryl talked about a project to implement Mambo to manage the British Columbia Public Library Services site.

Installation requirements:

• Linux
• Apache
• MySQL
• PHP
• Easysoft ODBC Bridge

Mambo components and modules

Issues with levels of access with Mambo. Need greater granularity.

• Login Module
• Main Menu Module
• Discussion Board
• Contacts Module
• Events Module
• Static Content Module

Mambo also supports RSS feeds, and ratings of documents.