Open Thread: Content Management Systems
Posted February 13th, 2009 by Cody Foss
One of the best things here at eduStyle is the community comments and discussions that happens among our users. To further that, we’d like to introduce the Open Thread. The way it will work is we’ll post a few questions about a particular topic related to higher-ed and encourage you to respond in the comments.
So without further ado, our first topic: Content Management Systems
- Does your school use a CMS?
- What do you love about your particular CMS?
- What drives you nuts about your CMS?
About the Author
Posts by Cody Foss:
5 Lessons from the eduStyle Awards
01 Sep 2009 in Uncategorized
Interview: Susan T. Evans of William & Mary
22 May 2009 in Uncategorized
Follow-up Interview: Elizabeth Houle of University of St. Thomas
15 May 2009 in Uncategorized
Open Thread: Homepage Goals
27 Feb 2009 in Uncategorized
Open Thread: Design Trends
20 Feb 2009 in Design& Open Thread
Open Thread: Content Management Systems
13 Feb 2009 in Open Thread
Update on the Book, Win an iPod Touch
12 Feb 2009 in Books& Reviews& Usability
How to Become a Noteworthy
19 Jun 2008 in Articles& Buzz& Noteworthy
Top 5 sites on eduStyle with zero votes
12 Jun 2008 in Features
February 13th, 2009 at 9:46 am
1. Yes we do, it was implemented on redesign. Inquira Information Manager
2. I love having a CMS versus what used to be… basic php pages.
3. The fact that everything has to be “figured out” on how to do something new. I get the R&D, due to the fact that we are using a system that is not necessarily meant as just an CMS. But I really would like a community or something to help with the R&D. Also, basic settings have to be overwritten for any list over 10 items. This is a problem more often than one would think I we have found out.
February 13th, 2009 at 9:52 am
we do use a cms system that was designed in house approx 4 yrs ago. and though it has served its purpose, basically, it sucks. i love nothing about it other than it allows us to have a number of content managers have the ability to make basic text/ images changes to their assigned pages. what drives me nuts is the lack of hard coding capability, multiple screen changes to accomplish basic tasks, and no intuitive controls. there are a lot of restraints that can be good from a monitoring standpoint, but are a too restrictive to get basic things done. lucky for us, we are in the process of investigating/implementing a new cms system that will solve all our issues… at least that is what we’re being promised. keeping me fingers crossed.
February 13th, 2009 at 10:04 am
1. YesOur current CMS is homegrown. We are in the process of taking a small step backwards (and forwards) to ActiveAdmissions.
2. I like our current CMS for its ease of use, and versatility. Since it is custom built it fits the needs of our staff to a tee. What I like about the new AA CMS is that it uses XSLT layouts to make changes a lot more flexible. The fact that is uses the pageID (key number) when setting the hyperlink value, but when published uses the actual page name. This way if we change a page name, we don’t have to edit all of our pages.
3. In our current CMS, I hate how much navigation is involved with getting to a page to publish it. It doesn’t use AJAX. In our new upcoming CMS I hate the bugs… Session based credentials are unreliable when you are building complex pages and spend more than 5 minutes on a page at a time.
Thanks,
Paul
February 13th, 2009 at 10:09 am
1. Does your school use a CMS?
Yes – dotCMS
2. What do you love about your particular CMS?
Very flexible, very customizable, nice to develop in without needing to make new tools or know Java.
3. What drives you nuts about your CMS?
Waiting on the addition of a bulk permissioning tool (it’s coming).
February 13th, 2009 at 10:20 am
We have a CMS called Ektron, the only thing I love about it is the fact that we will hopefully one day soon, replace it. It is a system that is old and was designed to support our institution 10 years ago, but not the way we operate today.
The editor is terrible and they are only now adding social features (blogs came on about 2 years ago).
Oh how I pine for Reddot (now Open Text)!
February 13th, 2009 at 10:26 am
1 – Yes, Ingeniux.
2 – XSLT is quite powerful and flexible once you get the hang of it.
3 – Flat file structure (apparently this is no longer an issue with Ingeniux but we are stuck with it from previous versions)
February 13th, 2009 at 10:37 am
1. Does your school use a CMS?
Yes, we are using Hannon Hill’s Cascade Server.
2. What do you love about your particular CMS?
We love that the campus web managers find it easy to use. We have nearly 250 users and the word on campus is only positive since our July 2008 deployment.
3. What drives you nuts about your CMS?
Delete = delete. We wish Delete = Recycle Bin. Informal conversations with the superb Hannon Hill team indicate that this is coming in a future release.
February 13th, 2009 at 11:09 am
1. Does your school use a CMS?
Yes, we use Finalsite.
2. What do you love about your particular CMS?
As a CMS for a school web site, Finalsite is comprehensive. It totally handles both our external marketing and public relations needs as well as internal faculty/student/parent portal needs. As a CMS that’s hosted “in the cloud”, I love that it’s in use by over 800 schools. This is more important than you might think, because it means that most (say, 95%) of the problems we /might/ have had were already run into by one of the other schools using Finalsite and have been fixed already. It also means you get updates instantly when they are coded.
3. What drives you nuts about your CMS?
Some of the navigation of the administrative menus is awkward, but in the big picture this is a pretty minor gripe minor. Sometimes little details of a feature might not be totally fleshed out, but we haven’t run into anything show-stopping.
February 13th, 2009 at 11:39 am
1. Does your school use a CMS?
Yes, we use Joomla(joomla.org)
2. What do you love about your particular CMS?
Very, very flexible. Has a large community with over 4,000 extensions. Decent documentation and API
3. What drives you nuts about your CMS?
no ORM. Few unit tests. Menu system can be difficult and redundant.
February 13th, 2009 at 11:55 am
1: Serena Collage
2: Versions, Deployments
3: Serena has basically stopped development on this product; therefore, our user base has to install old versions of software such as JRE 1.5 in order for Collage to work aside from the normal issues. It is also especially difficult for us since Collage prefers IE; however, a majority of our users only have access to a Mac with FF3.0 which will not work with Collage.
FYI: We are aware of its possible end of life and we keep our eyes open for new solutions.
February 13th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
@rileywills “We are aware of its possible end of life and we keep our eyes open for new solutions.”
You realize by stating that, you have more or less agreed to receive hundreds of emails from CMS vendors right?
February 13th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
@Cody Foss Hundreds? That would be only the first day of it right?
February 13th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
1. We use a fairly new CMS called Concrete5 (http://www.concrete5.org) on portions of our site.
2. Just about everything. I would have to say that the best part of it is the user-friendliness. It is incredibly intuitive.
3. It doesn’t have as much user support as CMS’s like Drupal and Joomla at the moment, but user support for it is growing.
February 13th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
1. Yes – Cascade
2. I really like its flexibility. I’m more likely to run into human resource limits than technical limits.
3. HTML WYSIWYGs just don’t cut it. It’s not a just a problem with our particular cms – we’ve had difficulty with them for our own apps as well.
February 13th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
1. sort of – if you stretch really hard and squint you can call Adobe Contribute a CMS.
2. really, nothing
3. it’s hard to use, requires a dedicated PC or Mac client, is very inflexible, doesn’t handle code inserts well. I could go on for days. If we had the resources we would move to something else. There is talk of redesigning the web site, so we might get a chance then to move to something else.
February 13th, 2009 at 10:22 pm
1) Yes. Joomla 1.0.13 – upgrading to Joomla 1.5 (very excited for Joomla 1.6)
2) I love that it empowers staff to maintain their areas of responsibility. I also love that extensibility of it with components, modules and mambots.
3) Working within the constraints of a CMS can be a little boring for a designer and can be a little awkward in maintaining the menu system.
Our site is http://www.lethbridgecollege.ca
February 14th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
1. Does your school use a CMS?
Yes. Expression Engine.
2. What do you love about your particular CMS?
The flexibility of Expression Engine allows us to create almost anything we need. The development community is fantastic.
3. What drives you nuts about your CMS?
The document workflow and approval process is not suitable for our needs.
There are several ways to build anything in Expression Engine making development more complex.
February 16th, 2009 at 8:48 am
@Cody & @designologist No worries on our side we have already phased through those emails, and it was more like a 1000 a day
February 16th, 2009 at 10:17 am
Expression Engine for the front page, Contribute for other pages.
Contribute – I love WYSIWYG editing for faculty/staff. If you can use Word, you can use Contribute.
Kyle Johnson already summed it up quite nicely. Having to install a program to edit a web page is so 1990’s…
February 16th, 2009 at 10:18 am
@jgarcia I’ve been looking at Concrete5. The in-page editing seems like a real plus for non-technical faculty and staff. Does Concrete5 have any blog/headlines/events functionality (ie. Are you using it for your university front page, or something else?).
February 17th, 2009 at 10:59 am
@sbell – no, it doesn’t have any sort of blogging/news functionality built in. we’re not using it on our homepage – mainly on academic/administrative department pages…but i wouldn’t be surprised if news/blog block is developed sometime soon, as i think it would be of benefit to a lot of people using c5. or if you’re a developer you could build it yourself
check out our web communications page for an example of some pages running on the CMS (there’s a link in the footer). its got the same look as the rest of the site but a lot of portions of it are automatically generated (such as the nav).
February 20th, 2009 at 9:17 am
[...] you for all that participated in last week’s Open Thread. It was a great success. Sounds like most of you use commercial CMSes and like the flexibility of [...]