November 2, 2007

IL2007: Content Management Systems

I kicked off this section with a brief overview of our year-long investigation into content management systems (CMSs), then passed it off to Amy Radermacher (Concordia University) and May Chang (University of Maryland) to discuss their own experiences with the CMSs chosen for them by their universities. I have to say I felt pretty lucky after hearing what they've had to go through...

Anyway, I'm going to learn how to use SlideShare and post my slides later today; in the meantime, thanks to ellbeecee for the action photos!

Speaker in Action Thanks for Listening

Posted by Ruth at 8:36 AM
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Ruth-
Saw you at IL2007 and asked about Joomla. My name is Bruce Wolfe. I am the MIS/CIO at MarinInstitute.org in San Rafael, CA, and principal consultant for GreenCampaigns.com in San Francisco, CA.

Very good even though quick presentation, it covered a good amount of aspects that I feel the audience understood. I am going to ask or state some challenging things here but am not doing so to be antagonistic but out of more curiosity.

I have used those sites you mentioned like CMSmatrix.org which was extremely helpful if not essential in choosing the CMS that was going to help me roll out sites quickly, get people learned and using them within 2 weeks and just hours of training, and very manageable and navigatable so that remote tech support can be had with ease for both parties.

It was a toss up between WebGUI and Joomla (Mambo at the time in 2004-05). WebGUI charged for support and had a smaller community and development over Joomla that was just tearing away from the rigid Mambo structure. Now, with over a thousand FREE templates and extensions/plug-ins/add-ons/components (for those not in the know, these are the features and tools that the community creates to make the website do certain things) Joomla won out easily.

I was confused which is why I asked about your choice of Drupal over Joomla. You mentioned your folks wanted to have a taxonomy that referenced more common terms than very technical ones. Drupal uses those technical terms like 'node' vs. section/category/area which more people are less afraid of. Others like Joomla, WebGUI, OpenCMS, etc.

Drupal is regarded as the technologists' or web-administrators' favorite as it has more technical control even with this new version. While, yes, a WYSIWYG editor makes for a very easy time, there are other aspects on the same editing page in Drupal that seems to still confuse newbies or even evolving Luddities over other CMS'. Also, the add-ons and APIs can get a little dicey here and there, too. For people like you and me, Drupal is just fine because we understand it as technologists but for the newbie user, I found several others, by actual study, did fair far better.

I am not writing this to be antagonistic but instead to understand more about why the choice of Drupal for the regular user.

Thanks for your indulgence and your presentation.

Bruce Wolfe, M.S.W., MIS/CIO

Nov 2, 2007, 9:04:00 AM

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