[thelist] CMS

[martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com]

Memo from Martin P Burns of PricewaterhouseCoopers

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>Basic functionality with some workflow management (ie new
>content has to be authorized before it goes live etc).

What kind of workflow? What are the business processes
involved?

A generic one might be (and bear in mind that this is
a loop, not a line...):
1) Communication need established (offline probably) for a new/
    updated content asset
2) Content commissioned (system kickoff) - the commissioning content
   manager allocates tasks
3) Content assets produced (written, photographed, illustrated etc)
4) Content signed off (multiple levels? Different signoffs for different
assets/
   areas of the site?)
5) Content goes live (launch scheduling? Date/delta time?)
6) Live content is assessed - is it still useful/relevant
7) Old content is archived or removed from live site (but still held in
    asset repository to be available as a basis for new production eg
    a Freshers' Week piece is probably going to be the same core info
    each year - a new top and tail to the same asset(s) might be enough)

>The problem is that I'm an ASP head,
>so I'm a bit loathed to start learning Tcl/Python in order to get it doing
>exactly what I'm after.

Ektron produce a *very* simple CMS which is CF or ASP...

>Also I've never really used a proper CMS system, and I was wondering what
>sort of authoring tools they supply.

How 'proper' do you want? (ie what's your budget?) Many major league ones
will accept Word docs, and Spectra does have a reasonable dHTML one.
Ektron has an editing tool which is OK and available separately.  I've not
looked at its output in a year or more, but it *used* to stick in multiple
nested
<font> tags, rather than sensible styles.

To be honest, the majority of what you'll need is simple, low-level
formatting
(ie <h#>, <strong>, links and simple tables for real tabular data - not
unlike
the range of code which the evolt site accepts:

http://evolt.org/guide_code/index.html

>What I've done before it built forms
>which cater for exact areas within a site, but this is going to need to be
>more flexiable then that.

That's the usual approach... I understand that Interwoven Teamsite is
improving in this area.

What's the business need for more flexibility?

Cheers
Martin


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