This article is currently on the WordPress admin dashboard, so people who obsessively check their WordPress admin page will have seen it already. But, it’s worth pointing to the article again as it outlines some things to consider when using WordPress as a CMS. I’m still a pretty hardcore Drupal guy – I use it for dozens of website projects, and it’s the Officially Supported Web Content Management System on campus (YAY!) – but there’s just something so nice, clean, and elegant about the WordPress UI.
And since we’re at a point now where the exact technology chosen really Does Not Matter Anymore (you can get pretty much any web software to do pretty much anything with proper prodding and understanding – and they pretty much all now properly grok RSS and tags, so it’s easy to reuse and republish what you get out there in multiple other formats and locations), it’s good to keep an open mind. Especially when getting ready to start rolling out a campus blogging system based on WPMU…
Update: almost forgot. I probably should have linked to the resource website I put together with the Amazing Reverend Jim for our Out of Print session at Open Education 2007… There are a LOT of cool things you can do with WordPress, even if ignoring the blogging functionality entirely…
And I would have used a photo of me in my awesome WordPress hoodie, ala Jim Groom and/or Alan Levine, but alas mine never showed up. *sniff* I’ll just have to use the photo of me in my red WordPress shirt, taken by The Reverend Jim Himself at Open Ed 2007.
I hinted at this in a previous post, but it wasn't "official" yet so I didn't provide any details. It's now official. The University of Calgary just finished the official CMS selection process, including input from ~140 web folks on campus and 6 presentations on 6 different CMS options. I was asked to present on Drupal, drawing on what we've done on some projects, and how it might fit into a larger community and workflow on campus.
The technical committee recommended Drupal last week (followed by Joomla – the only 2 solutions recommended were open source!), and the CMS group (including our IT department) approved that recommendation this week. The Teaching & Learning Centre abstained from voting to avoid any appearance of pushing one solution over the others.
So, over the next few weeks, our IT department will be getting up to speed on hosting Drupal. I'll be working with them to transfer information about our experiences in the Teaching & Learning Centre, and they'll merge that with their enterprise plan.
The short term goal is to provide an easy and effective way for faculties and departments to manage their websites without needing geeks in-house. If they can view a web page and use MS Word, they have the skills to maintain a website with Drupal.
Since this is now an officially supported CMS on campus, our IT department will be setting up servers, providing tech support, and keeping the gears meshed. The TLC will likely be providing project-specific support, and perhaps more general pedagogical guidance (what to do with it, what not to do with it, how to use it to enhance blended learning, etc…)
The longer term goal is to take advantage of some of the more social/community-oriented features, and open it up to individuals on campus. No timeline on that part of the plan at the moment, though, but that has me more excited than migrating the quasi-static websites into a CMS.
There are even longer term (and much grander) plans being discussed, but I won't mention details except to say that this could be a very big thing, both on campus, and for Drupal.
We've also begun investigating how Drupal may play a part in the U of C's podcasting (and larger digital media sharing) strategies. Ideally, we'd have a combination of iTunesU, Blackboard and Drupal, each playing to their respective strengths.
I've ranted about the IT department before, but I have to give them full props now. They went the extra mile to support an open source solution, when commercial packages might have caused them less grief (but also provided less flexibility and control). Sometimes the good guys do come out ahead…
I hinted at this in a previous post, but it wasn't "official" yet so I didn't provide any details. It's now official. The University of Calgary just finished the official CMS selection process, including input from ~140 web folks on campus and 6 presentations on 6 different CMS options. I was asked to present on Drupal, drawing on what we've done on some projects, and how it might fit into a larger community and workflow on campus.
The technical committee recommended Drupal last week (followed by Joomla – the only 2 solutions recommended were open source!), and the CMS group (including our IT department) approved that recommendation this week. The Teaching & Learning Centre abstained from voting to avoid any appearance of pushing one solution over the others.
So, over the next few weeks, our IT department will be getting up to speed on hosting Drupal. I'll be working with them to transfer information about our experiences in the Teaching & Learning Centre, and they'll merge that with their enterprise plan.
The short term goal is to provide an easy and effective way for faculties and departments to manage their websites without needing geeks in-house. If they can view a web page and use MS Word, they have the skills to maintain a website with Drupal.
Since this is now an officially supported CMS on campus, our IT department will be setting up servers, providing tech support, and keeping the gears meshed. The TLC will likely be providing project-specific support, and perhaps more general pedagogical guidance (what to do with it, what not to do with it, how to use it to enhance blended learning, etc…)
The longer term goal is to take advantage of some of the more social/community-oriented features, and open it up to individuals on campus. No timeline on that part of the plan at the moment, though, but that has me more excited than migrating the quasi-static websites into a CMS.
There are even longer term (and much grander) plans being discussed, but I won't mention details except to say that this could be a very big thing, both on campus, and for Drupal.
We've also begun investigating how Drupal may play a part in the U of C's podcasting (and larger digital media sharing) strategies. Ideally, we'd have a combination of iTunesU, Blackboard and Drupal, each playing to their respective strengths.
I've ranted about the IT department before, but I have to give them full props now. They went the extra mile to support an open source solution, when commercial packages might have caused them less grief (but also provided less flexibility and control). Sometimes the good guys do come out ahead…
I just gave a demo of Drupal to the UCalgary “web content management system” workgroup – they’re trying to figure out which is The One True CMS that will be supported by IT for use on campus by faculties and departments to easily manage their websites.
Previous sessions were given by advocates of RedDot, ADX Studio, Joomla, Ironpoint, and OmniUpdate. That’s a pretty wide range of proposed solutions, from the high-end, high-cost “enterprise” options, all the way to free/open source options.
Ricardo gave his Joomla session on Monday, and got to champion open source as an important part of the selection process. I got to give a hearty “yeah, me too” and then spent most of the session demoing Drupal, creating content, administering a site, showing several sample sites, and answering questions. I was initially thinking I’d only use about 30 minutes of my 2-hour block, but wound up spending an hour and a half working through solutions and discussing stuff with the group.
Some of the questions were about some really intricate and subtle concepts within Drupal, so people had either done their homework, or they paid attention, or both. We talked quite a bit about the extensible security model in Drupal, about scalability, extensible content types, taxonomies, users and roles, modules and themes, and a bunch of other stuff.
I spent much of the session showing custom content types via the Content Creation Kit, evangelizing RSS as a way to pipe content between sites and systems, and showing various parts of the user- and admin experience.
I’m curious to see which CMS they select at the end of this process. I think they were quite receptive to Drupal, but it’s hard to tell which agenda(s) are most important.
I just gave a demo of Drupal to the UCalgary “web content management system” workgroup – they’re trying to figure out which is The One True CMS that will be supported by IT for use on campus by faculties and departments to easily manage their websites.
Previous sessions were given by advocates of RedDot, ADX Studio, Joomla, Ironpoint, and OmniUpdate. That’s a pretty wide range of proposed solutions, from the high-end, high-cost “enterprise” options, all the way to free/open source options.
Ricardo gave his Joomla session on Monday, and got to champion open source as an important part of the selection process. I got to give a hearty “yeah, me too” and then spent most of the session demoing Drupal, creating content, administering a site, showing several sample sites, and answering questions. I was initially thinking I’d only use about 30 minutes of my 2-hour block, but wound up spending an hour and a half working through solutions and discussing stuff with the group.
Some of the questions were about some really intricate and subtle concepts within Drupal, so people had either done their homework, or they paid attention, or both. We talked quite a bit about the extensible security model in Drupal, about scalability, extensible content types, taxonomies, users and roles, modules and themes, and a bunch of other stuff.
I spent much of the session showing custom content types via the Content Creation Kit, evangelizing RSS as a way to pipe content between sites and systems, and showing various parts of the user- and admin experience.
I’m curious to see which CMS they select at the end of this process. I think they were quite receptive to Drupal, but it’s hard to tell which agenda(s) are most important.
Cole‘s looking for information about Zope/Plone for possible use in an academic setting. I’ve dabbled with Plone, but that was something like 18 months ago, so my info is a bit stale.
Thought I’d fire off a question into the Lazyweb to help Cole gather info (because I’m curious, too).
Anyone have any experience with Zope/Plone? How does it compare with Drupal? Pros? Cons? Scalability? The service may need to scale to an institutional level, IIRC…
Cole‘s looking for information about Zope/Plone for possible use in an academic setting. I’ve dabbled with Plone, but that was something like 18 months ago, so my info is a bit stale.
Thought I’d fire off a question into the Lazyweb to help Cole gather info (because I’m curious, too).
Anyone have any experience with Zope/Plone? How does it compare with Drupal? Pros? Cons? Scalability? The service may need to scale to an institutional level, IIRC…
Yojimbo 1.0 was just released – by Bare Bones Software (the folks that make the kick-ass editor BBEdit), and it looks like the best personal content manager I’ve used. DevonThink is overly complicated, and Notational Velocity is a little to simple (but that is also its strength).
Yojimbo takes the best of both approaches, and distills it all into a simple (but powerful) interface on top of some powerful (and elegant) features.
I’ll be playing with it more over the next few days, but it looks like I’ll be putting in for a license…
Yojimbo 1.0 was just released – by Bare Bones Software (the folks that make the kick-ass editor BBEdit), and it looks like the best personal content manager I’ve used. DevonThink is overly complicated, and Notational Velocity is a little to simple (but that is also its strength).
Yojimbo takes the best of both approaches, and distills it all into a simple (but powerful) interface on top of some powerful (and elegant) features.
I’ll be playing with it more over the next few days, but it looks like I’ll be putting in for a license…
I grabbed a copy of Joomla the other day, to play around with another option for a CMS to use for projects at the Learning Commons. Some early thoughts:
- The admin UI seems very well done – but man, is there a lot of stuff in there. Not sure I’d want to unleash that interface on a novice user, or even a casual Office warrior. I’m sure it makes more sense as you get used to it, but it’s even more jarring than Drupal, and much more complicated than WordPress (likely necessarily so, since it does so much more than WordPress, but seems like it should be on par with Drupal).
- Seems like a very odd definition of “Open Source” in the Joomla community. Likely some historical context to make it meaningful, but of the several Joomla community sites that I’ve visited for modules and templates, they all seem to require logins to download stuff, and several require paid subscriptions – some quite steep – just to get access to something that I thought was GPL. Bizarre…
- The content publishing process seems much more complicated than Drupal or WordPress. How do you determine which chunks of content make it to the front page, in what location? The admin interface provides a lot of bells and doodads to control that, but it’s not immediately obvious how to control the flow of content.
- It’s got a really nice level of granularity for permissions. Admins, publishers, editors, managers, writers, etc… All with their own sets of restrictions. People with access to the admin UI can publish content immediately, while “lesser” users need to have stuff approved before it shows up.
- The URL structure is pretty much semantically meaningless. URLs take the form of
/content/view/14/2/ – and that’s with the “search engine friendly” option turned on – it’s even worse without that. There’s a spot for a “Title Alias” – but it doesn’t seem to get used as the Post Slug does in WordPress, or the Path does in Drupal. Maybe there’s another bit to twiddle for that to kick in…
- The pervasive rich text editor / WYSIWYG dealie is pretty nice.
- Joomla feels like a robust, mature CMS. Things like content checkin/checkout, staledating, moderation, etc. appear to be done quite nicely.
- What’s up with Joomla’s RSS Feeds feature? It’s borked. Right now, it just gives a list of feeds, and you have to click on each one to get a list of items. It should give a merged list of items, ala Drupal or FeedOnFeeds or SuprGlu or etc…
- Installing templates and modules – hasn’t worked for me so far. Not sure what the exact process is. Doesn’t seem to work if you just drop files into the templates or modules directories. The provided Upload/Install feature fails for me, too. I’m sure it works, but I haven’t tripped over the piece of documentation describing the installation process.
I’ll have more thoughts over the next few days – I’m setting up an instance for a demo on Friday. Right now, Drupal feels more “fluid” but Joomla feels more “newspaper-ish”. If that makes sense.
Here’s a handful of screenshots of various stages of the content publishing process:
I grabbed a copy of Joomla the other day, to play around with another option for a CMS to use for projects at the Learning Commons. Some early thoughts:
- The admin UI seems very well done – but man, is there a lot of stuff in there. Not sure I’d want to unleash that interface on a novice user, or even a casual Office warrior. I’m sure it makes more sense as you get used to it, but it’s even more jarring than Drupal, and much more complicated than WordPress (likely necessarily so, since it does so much more than WordPress, but seems like it should be on par with Drupal).
- Seems like a very odd definition of “Open Source” in the Joomla community. Likely some historical context to make it meaningful, but of the several Joomla community sites that I’ve visited for modules and templates, they all seem to require logins to download stuff, and several require paid subscriptions – some quite steep – just to get access to something that I thought was GPL. Bizarre…
- The content publishing process seems much more complicated than Drupal or WordPress. How do you determine which chunks of content make it to the front page, in what location? The admin interface provides a lot of bells and doodads to control that, but it’s not immediately obvious how to control the flow of content.
- It’s got a really nice level of granularity for permissions. Admins, publishers, editors, managers, writers, etc… All with their own sets of restrictions. People with access to the admin UI can publish content immediately, while “lesser” users need to have stuff approved before it shows up.
- The URL structure is pretty much semantically meaningless. URLs take the form of
/content/view/14/2/ – and that’s with the “search engine friendly” option turned on – it’s even worse without that. There’s a spot for a “Title Alias” – but it doesn’t seem to get used as the Post Slug does in WordPress, or the Path does in Drupal. Maybe there’s another bit to twiddle for that to kick in…
- The pervasive rich text editor / WYSIWYG dealie is pretty nice.
- Joomla feels like a robust, mature CMS. Things like content checkin/checkout, staledating, moderation, etc. appear to be done quite nicely.
- What’s up with Joomla’s RSS Feeds feature? It’s borked. Right now, it just gives a list of feeds, and you have to click on each one to get a list of items. It should give a merged list of items, ala Drupal or FeedOnFeeds or SuprGlu or etc…
- Installing templates and modules – hasn’t worked for me so far. Not sure what the exact process is. Doesn’t seem to work if you just drop files into the templates or modules directories. The provided Upload/Install feature fails for me, too. I’m sure it works, but I haven’t tripped over the piece of documentation describing the installation process.
I’ll have more thoughts over the next few days – I’m setting up an instance for a demo on Friday. Right now, Drupal feels more “fluid” but Joomla feels more “newspaper-ish”. If that makes sense.
Here’s a handful of screenshots of various stages of the content publishing process:
Just installing Mambo for a demo of various CMS options to the team tomorrow. The Mambo 4.5.2.3 installer borked while creating a table, choking on a missing default value for “rating_sum”.
Easy fix. Line 221 of mambo/installation/sql/mambo.sql is dealing with setting up the content_rating table. Modify the sql thusly:
`rating_sum` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
Aside from that silly sql bug, the Mambo installer is pretty slick. I’ll likely blog my early thoughts of it as a CMS, after I’ve played with it for awhile…
Update: Well, looks like my Mambo installation is pretty much borked. I can’t edit content – keep getting MySQL errors on missing tables or fields. I’ll try nuking and reinstalling, but this was a fresh install from the latest build, so I’m not sure what could be wrong…
Update: Nope. It’s still borked. Install claims to have run successfully, but any attempt to edit content results in this:
DB function failed with error number 1054
Unknown column 'c.access' in 'on clause' SQL=SELECT c.*, g.name AS groupname, cc.name, u.name AS editor, f.content_id AS frontpage, s.title AS section_name, v.name AS author
FROM mos_content AS c, mos_categories AS cc, mos_sections AS s
LEFT JOIN mos_groups AS g ON g.id = c.access
LEFT JOIN mos_users AS u ON u.id = c.checked_out
LEFT JOIN mos_users AS v ON v.id = c.created_by
LEFT JOIN mos_content_frontpage AS f ON f.content_id = c.id
WHERE c.state >= 0 AND c.catid=cc.id AND cc.section=s.id AND s.scope='content' AND c.sectionid='1'
ORDER BY cc.ordering, cc.title, c.ordering
LIMIT 0,10
Update: Mambo was borked, but the Joomla fork of the project installed perfectly…
Just installing Mambo for a demo of various CMS options to the team tomorrow. The Mambo 4.5.2.3 installer borked while creating a table, choking on a missing default value for “rating_sum”.
Easy fix. Line 221 of mambo/installation/sql/mambo.sql is dealing with setting up the content_rating table. Modify the sql thusly:
`rating_sum` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
Aside from that silly sql bug, the Mambo installer is pretty slick. I’ll likely blog my early thoughts of it as a CMS, after I’ve played with it for awhile…
Update: Well, looks like my Mambo installation is pretty much borked. I can’t edit content – keep getting MySQL errors on missing tables or fields. I’ll try nuking and reinstalling, but this was a fresh install from the latest build, so I’m not sure what could be wrong…
Update: Nope. It’s still borked. Install claims to have run successfully, but any attempt to edit content results in this:
DB function failed with error number 1054
Unknown column 'c.access' in 'on clause' SQL=SELECT c.*, g.name AS groupname, cc.name, u.name AS editor, f.content_id AS frontpage, s.title AS section_name, v.name AS author
FROM mos_content AS c, mos_categories AS cc, mos_sections AS s
LEFT JOIN mos_groups AS g ON g.id = c.access
LEFT JOIN mos_users AS u ON u.id = c.checked_out
LEFT JOIN mos_users AS v ON v.id = c.created_by
LEFT JOIN mos_content_frontpage AS f ON f.content_id = c.id
WHERE c.state >= 0 AND c.catid=cc.id AND cc.section=s.id AND s.scope='content' AND c.sectionid='1'
ORDER BY cc.ordering, cc.title, c.ordering
LIMIT 0,10
Update: Mambo was borked, but the Joomla fork of the project installed perfectly…
