Implementing CMS: Academic

David Bietilabietila@gelman.gwu.edu

George Washington University

Jonathan M. Smithsmithjm@cua.edu

The Catholic University of America

GWU Overview

• Content Management System used for public site

• Powered by Plone: an open source CMS• Launched in January, 2009• Site created by Web Team

o Web Services Librarian, student programmer, representatives of Reference, two satellite campuses, Special Collections

Determining Needs

• Identified needs based on student and staff feedbacko Usability testing, focus groups, comments

• 11 Project objectives (including)o Intuitive navigation & searchingo Consistent visual designo Minimize redundancy in contento Provide tools to staff allowing them to create web

content directly• Identified that a CMS could be solution to

several of these issues

Evaluating Features

• Considered Drupal, Joomla, and Plone• Scoring criteria

o Taxonomyo Navigationo User Managemento Stability: support and ongoing development

Addon dependenceo Standards Compliance: valid XHTML & CSS

• Plone scored significantly higher for uso Based on Python and Zope

CUA Overview

• Content Management System (CMS) used for staff intranet

• Chose Mambo as our solutiono One year later, migrated to Joomla!

• Went live in summer of 2005• Staff Web Site Committee

Selection

Mission Statement

"STAR: Staff Resources for the CUA Libraries is a collaborative effort to facilitate communications throughout the CUA Libraries and serve as a central repository of policies, procedures and forms."

Selection

• Establishing needs & evaluating featureso Stakeholders = library faculty and staffo How to import existing content?o Common open source platform

Apache, MySQL, PHPo Knowledge of HTML not necessary for content

authorso Active user community

Deployment - Learning

• Install CMS on development server• Online documentation

o http://docs.joomla.org• User forums

o http://forum.joomla.org• Joomla in Libraries

o http://www.joomlainlibrary.com• Books

Deployment and Costs

• Technical Deploymento Local Hosting

Development and production servers

• Costso Serverso Software = $0o Initial staff timeo Ongoing staff time

Organization

• Content Typeso Text: articles, blog postso Files: pdf, ppt, xls, etc.

• Taxonomyo Hierarchical structureo By function, not department

Security/Ownership

• Accessible to general public?• Public content vs. restricted content• User levels – author, editor, publisher• Content ownership

Deployment - Learning

• Local laptop installation• Courses• Conferences/User groups• Documentation on web and in books• IRC support channel• Peer institutions• Consultants

Deployment - Technical

• Hosting – evaluated companies based ono Plone expertiseo Academic clientso Level of support

• Specifications for Development, Production, and Backup servers

• Divided content migration duties and manually transferred pages

Implementation Costs

• Hosting costs: ~$5,000/year• Consulting fees: ~$2,000

o Configuring caching and load balancingo Development of custom templates

• Staff timeo 1.5 year project for our Web Team

Typically several hours per week Usability testing Graphic design Content and taxonomy development Plone configuration

Content Types

• Default typeso Pages, news items, folderso Collections

Means of grouping content objects like queries

• Addonso Faculty/Staff Directory – from UPenno Scrawl – blog post content type

Security/Ownership

• Plone supports granular ownership and rights over site content

• Publicationo Content staging – public and private states

• Workflowo Can assign rights over different parts of the

publishing process Create, Edit, and Publish

Taxonomy

• Opportunity to rethink organization• Move away from departmental

organization of content• Categories intended to reflect functional

needs of users• Also created a secondary taxonomy

based on intended audience

Theming

• Creation of unique look and feel• Began from a set of draft page designs predating our

selection of Plone• Modified Plone display elements to reflect our

proposed layouto HTML templateso CSS – for fonts, images, positioning

Training

• Conducted departmental training sessionso Covered content creation and editingo Provided overview of architecture to Library iT

• Individual trainings and followups, as needed

Feedback/Problems

• Feedbacko Very positive user feedbacko Staff reported that page editing was intuitive

Some issues copying from Word

• Technical issues mostly in initial month of useo Form bugso Memory leako Caching issueso Logged in users are more resource intensive

Improvements

• Eliminated redundant content occurrences• No longer have to support a separate blog

platform• Staff able to make edits

o Off-site editing, no software required

Improvements

• Consistent visual identity• Enhanced navigation

o Automated site map, section menus, breadcrumbs

o More coherent taxonomy

Future Plans

• Long enhancement listo Improved staff directoryo Improved media supporto Customized authentication

• Plan to configure second Plone instance as Intranet

• Usability testing

Feedback/Problems

• Initial rush, then decreased content creation

• Fulfills role as policy repository• Desired features• Not used for communication• Use is consistently high or low depending

on department

Future Plans

• Site Redesign• Major upgrade• Reevaluate taxonomy• Desired features/functionality• Refresh visual design