After writing the project page for wpSMS I didn’t have much more to say in a blog post announcing it. The cool thing about writing Pages in WordPress is that I can create a taxonomy like /projects/wpsms/ to place them in. The downside is that new pages never appear in the RSS feed.

So I need both the page and a blog post to announce it. I could have simply copied the content from the wpSMS page into a blog post, but that creates confusion and splits the audience between the two pages. Instead, I’m using two bSuite features: the [include] shortcode and the post redirection support.

1. Create the page.
2. Start a new post.
   1. In the post body put the include shortcode like this: [include post_id="123" field="post_content"].
   2. In the custom fields put an entry with the key: “redirect” and the full URL to to your page.
3. Relax, you’re done.

The include shortcode will copy all the content from the page (so you don’t have to manage it twice), and the redirect custom field will tell bSuite to redirect anybody trying to read that post to your page.

The question:

What’s a good user-friendly Macintosh web development program? A friend called. She’s thinking of buying Dreamweaver, but is afraid it will be overkill. She found Frontpage to be easy and needs something similar.

My answer:

If the intent is to design individual pages on an unknown number of sites, then I don’t have a recommendation.

If the intent is to build a site (or any number of sites), then I’d suggest looking at WordPress. It’s an open source CMS, and there’s a hosted version that makes it easy to try out at WordPress.com.

What I didn’t say, well, it was buried in my answer, was that I see a big difference between designing a page and building a site. The tools are very different.

wordpress, web design, site management, cms, content management, questions

Zach got a call from the Serena Collage rep who rattled off this list of customers in New England:

• Boston College
• Northeastern
• Bristol Community College
• UMass Lowell

cms, content management, web content management, serena, collage, serena collage, content management system, vendor, commercial cms

We got the demo yesterday of Sungard/SCT’s Luminis Content Management Suite (sales video). I mentioned previously that the sales rep thinks Pima Community College and Edison College show it off well.

Here’s what we learned in the demo:

It started with the explanation that data is stored as XML, processed by JSP, and rendered to the browser as XHTML according to templates, layouts, and “web views.” It was later explained that the product was “web server agnostic” and could run under Apache, IIS, SunOne, or others. This works because the only relationship between the web server and LCMS is on the file system. LCMS works up the pages, then spits them out onto the filesystem to be picked up by the webserver. LCMS does not dynamically generate the pages, and it has no features to support dynamic content.

LCMS supports three modes for admins and content authors to view and edit content: in-context, “site studio,” and some other mode that wasn’t demonstrated. WYSIWYG editing was via the Real Objects editor. They were proud of the editor’s ability to accept content, including a table, pasted in from MS Word, but a look at the code revealed some of the same ugliness that we’ve seen from an export directly from Word.

The software is workflow heavy and our demonstrator had to “manually promote” content with every example. He assured us this would not be necessary under production circumstances, but the product had the appearance of having been designed to slow or prevent changes to web content rather than streamline the process.

From now on I’ll be asking the following question at all demos:

The library is hosting an exhibition next week. Please walk us through the process of creating a new page to describe and promote the event and then integrate that page in the library’s site taxonomy.

I mention this because the demo didn’t show us anything like that. We saw only the editing of pages and it looked frustratingly cumbersome, with one example requiring several return visits to the site studio to promote an edited page from in-progress to approved to live (three is the minimum number of steps, but we were told we can have 15 or 20 or more if we wanted). If the content author didn’t have promotion authority, then the process could require the involvement and coordination of two or more people. It’s easy to imagine days passing before page corrections went live and weeks passing before new content could be put online.

That said, the site admins have it a little easier (if only because one assumes they have supreme permissions for everything). The templating didn’t look bad, but because the product doesn’t generate any dynamic pages, it couldn’t take advantage of some automation opportunities (the demonstrator was excited to tell us the footer text — “copyright 2005” — could be globally changed by editing a singe file, but we were curious why the copyright date wasn’t dynamically generated).

Permissions can be assigned per object by user or group. These details are stored in the Luminis LDAP, but they’re not shared with or based on any group or permission we’re already managing. That is, we’ll have to pay attention to provisioning (and de-provisioning) specific to the CMS. It’s amusing that vendors claim LDAP integration but remain ignorant of identity management issues.

There are seven levels of permission for each user or group on each object:

• none
• browse
• read
• relate
• version
• write
• delete

And then there are these extended permissions:

• exec
• change location
• change state
• change perms
• change owner

It’s worth noting that the product maintains versioned copies of each content object, making it very easy to revert to any previous saved edit or simply review prior content.

Somewhere along the line we were told “at its core you get a document management system.” And then we saw a demo of the product working as a document repository. The demos showed a content author “checking out” a Word file via the browser, downloading it for editing, then checking the edited version back in, entering metadata and version info, and viewing the changed document in the repository.

APIs?

• Web Development Kit
  — Java apps that create the content authoring/management interface
• Documentum Foundation Classes
  — C++ API that runs the show

There are no SOAP or other webservices-based APIs, and it didn’t seem like there was much movement toward them.

Implementation?
A claimed three to six month implementation process including four or more weeks of service from SCT.

cms, lcms, sct, sungard, luminis, luminis cms, content management system, sungard sct, luminis content management suite, content management, web content management, demo, sales demo

Everybody wants a content management system, but there’s little agreement about what a CMS is or what it should do. Even knowledgeable people often find themselves struggling for an answer before giving up and defining a CMS by example.

The problem is that we know we want better websites, and we know technology should help, but how.

Jeffery Veen offers some sage advice to those who would ignore the non-technical facets of the problem:

Over and over I’ve heard the same complaint about [CMS implementations], “Turns out, after all the budget and time we spent, we really didn’t need a content management system at all. We just needed some editors.”

That is, software can’t build good websites. The web lives on text, well written text, and that has to be at the center of any CMS project. Veen’s suggestion that companies put more editorial staff on the job may seem at odds with my own recommendations that companies encourage blogging and distributed authorship, but I see them as complementary. Every site needs strong leadership, editors, not web designers, should be driving that.

Still, organizations go looking for software solutions to the problem. Big name commercial solutions in this space include Vignette, Broadvision, nCompass, Interwoven, and Open Market Content Server, but all of these six-digit price-tag CMSs appear to suffer a gap between buyer’s expectations and actual product functionality, according to Shorewalker.

Among other salient quotes from Jupiter Resarch reports on CMSs, the Shorewalker story offers this:

Today, more than 60 percent of companies that have deployed Web content management solutions still find themselves manually updating their sites…

That’s a huge risk for a product with such a high price tag, but where Shorewalker’s story rings my bell is here:

[T]he real cost isn’t in the box of software. It’s in the cheques you write to the people who install, adapt and maintain the software.

Remember, the cost of any software product is be broken into three categories: acquisition, integration, and maintenance. Some product categories have relatively low integration costs, but CMS are too immature and our needs are too diverse to be among them. And this is why home-grown and open-source CMS solutions are worth a good look: you may have to invest more on integration, but the result will probably be better than with a commercial product, and the total investment will most likely be lower because it eliminates the acquisition costs.

tags: broadvision, cms, cms pitfalls, cms project, cmss, commerical vs. open source, content management, content management system, editorial authority, interwoven, pitfalls, vignette, web content, web designers, web site management