No, this post isn’t about another license, credential, or degree to put after your name. CMS stands for content management system, and in this case I’m referring to any of the applications that allow for publishing, editing, and organizing of content on web pages. Content management systems are powerful tools that make it easy to create, manage, and update websites and web content. But do you really need a content management system for your website? Due to their wide range of capabilities, these systems can be very large and slow, which might not be a suitable trade-off if you’re trying to build a very simple website. Below, I outline some* considerations you should make before deciding whether to use a CMS. Content How much content will be posted, and how often? If you only have a fixed amount of content to post — maybe you just need the basics, like library…
Tag: content management system
2008 National Forum: A Homegrown CMS
With all the commerical and open source content management systems on the market, why would a library still choose to build their own? In 2006, the University of Houston Libraries did just that. Rachel Vacek discussed their rationale and effort in Putting the Library Website in Their Hands: The Advantages and Challenges of a Homegrown Content Management System. (Note: Rachel indicated her slides will be available on rachelvacek.com, but were not there as of this writing, or I didn’t go deep enough into her site.) UHL chose to develop their own CMS primarily because they wanted a system based on their vision of what a CMS is and should do, rather than modifying someone else’s. UHL feels that the CMS should be a growing and changing system. They felt that by building their own system their staff would be able to fix problems and incorporate customer feedback more quickly. They felt that by building their…
Weiling Liu, Building Collaborative Web Applications with Drupal
Weiling Liu, University of Louisville (Kentucky) Session summary: An excellent demonstration of the modular and flexible nature of Drupal, an open-source web content management system. Drupal has featured prominently in library conferences recently; however, one of the strengths of Liu’s presentation was in the two project examples she used: managing news and events web content that comes from a variety of library staff; and creating a library conference application that collected conference proposals, turned the accepted proposals into a conference schedule, and provided a place to link to conference presentations after the conference. Also useful are her “Lessons Learned the Hard Way” (near the end of this post). Liu began by describing Drupal and showing examples of Kentucky-area library sites that use Drupal. She then described two projects that used Drupal to solve what were complicated projects with poor workflows: enabling library staff to post content about library news and…