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January 15, 2006

content management system for department website

Like many of you academics who have a bit of IT expertise but who do not work in IT departments, I have some official responsibility to maintain my department's website. Currently, there are two goals for changing the way we run the website:

  1. Make it easier for a larger number of authorized people to make necessary changes.
  2. Provide more regularly upated information about events.

The second of these two goals can be accomplished easily enough with one page run by something like Blogger. There are a number of options for the first goal, but it would be nice to choose the one that is most elegant and provides the lowest hurdle of necessary expertise.

If you are so inclined, oh loyal readership, I'd like to know how other departments pull off the above two tasks.

In order to consider different options, I'd like to learn more about possible content management systems for the website, which is currently composed of static HTML pages residing on a server running Microsoft software.1 Whenever somebody wants something updated, they email the person or persons in charge of maintaining the website and request the change. This is not such an imposition, but it would be much better (IMHO) if there were a number of people with the authority to make changes, each of them responsible for different sections of the site.

We had been using a system by which one person used Dreamweaver to create pages and make changes, but that system seems to have broken down. I've never learned how to use Dreamweaver beyond the rudimentary stuff, preferring instead to code by hand or install server-side software that comes with customizable templates.2

Ideally, a person should not have to have particular software installed on her computer to make changes. Additionally, a person should not have to go through any elaborate training in order to make changes.3

I welcome any suggestions.

  1. I think. I will need to contact campus IT support and get the details from them.
  2. I'm such a stud, I know.
  3. It's 2006. If you know how to use a word processor, you should know how to update a webpage. The software should be that simple.

Posted by at 10:17 AM | | Comments (9)

April 11, 2004

wanna see my wiki?

In the interests of experimenting with a variety of online, collaborative technologies, I installed a very simple wiki. Play around with it, if you like. It's the simplest one I could find: PhpWiki.

I'm not sure, yet, what use I/we might have for a wiki, but it's worth experimenting. If you're unfamiliar with wikis, check out the relevant entry in the Wikipedia. I think I would install MediaWiki if I had a specific project in mind because it seems to provide more controls over editing.

Posted by at 11:30 PM | | Comments (5)

February 7, 2004

templates for bibliographic database schemas?

Here is a question asked in the face of way too many Google hits: if I want to create an online, collaboratively built, bibliographic database (mySQL and PHP), do I have to come up with the schema myself, or are there something like "plug-and-play" templates out there much in the way that there are for CSS and HTML?

Posted by at 11:09 AM |

January 11, 2004

"using wikis for content management"

Via Many-to-Many: "Using Wikis for content management...." Here, Tom Coates addresses what has been one of my reservations about wikis, the somewhat awkward resulting appearance and navigational elements: "the particularly networked rather than heirarchical model of navigation that they lend themselves towards isn't suitable for all kinds of public-facing sites (the same could be said of the one-size-fits-all design of the pages)." Coates asks us to

imagine for a moment that the Wiki page itself is nothing but a content management interface and that the Wiki has a separate templating and publishing engine that grabs what you've written on the page, turns it into a nicely designed fully-functioning (uneditable) web-page and publishes it to the world. It could make the creation of small information rich sites enormously quick - particularly if you built in FTP stuff.

Indeed. Make it so.

Posted by at 8:52 PM |

January 4, 2004

help for the color-design challenged

Admiring the new color scheme over at WeezBlog and working on setting up course blogs for next semester (with frequent stupid questions sent Liz Lawley's way), I'm remembering that back in the days of the browser-safe color palette, Lynda Weinman had a book called Coloring Web Graphics that included page after glossy page of sample website designs with color codes for the creatively lazy. If you liked a particular design, it was easy to just adopt the colors for your own purposes.

Does anything like that exist out on the web? (He asked without bothering to google first.)

Posted by at 12:40 PM | | Comments (5)

January 2, 2004

layout-in-progress

Obviously I'm still trying some things with the style sheet. Bear with me.

Posted by at 1:49 PM |

new year, new layout

I switched back to a 2-column layout. If you are experiencing any weirdness in how it displays (e.g. on Mac's), please let me know. Include your OS version and your browser version. Thanks!

Update: Other things I'm trying to achieve include changing "recent comments" on the main page to "recent comments and trackbacks" (any tips on how to do that?), using the "categories" function, and using a drop-down for the categories and archive months. Yes, I'm just stealing features from some of my favorite blogs. Oh, I'd also like to enable limited HTML in the comments, but I'm unsure how to do that. I know I could read around on the web and figure it out for myself, but I'll start with the lazy approach: can anyone point me in the right direction?

Posted by at 10:49 AM | | Comments (8)