[thelist] Custom CMS

[Rachel Cunliffe]

Hi Ken,

The University Department I work for has come across the same issues and I'm
currently working on (finishing?!) a simple CMS for them.

Issues were that multiple versions of the same information were being
updated by different people, on different computers (offline, in Word files)
and everything was getting messed up.

The secretarial staff - who manage much of the admin side of the department
were happy to keep updating their word files (eg Staff Contact Details) but,
even though they basically knew how to use, say Pagemill, very often mucked
the code/template up and information on the web totally got out of date and
messy.

For example, course information is presented in three forms:

1. Printed handbook (sent to printers each year)
2. Website listing
3. Individual staff/paper homepages

Once they realised they won't have three versions of the same information
(just one in a database), they can edit the information once, and it'll be
changed everywhere immediately - and any staff member has access to change
his/her own page/paper information - information is kept up-to-date and much
less error-ridden - then they were very keen to change over to CMS.

No-one can complain that the secretaries haven't been updating their
information - changes are immediate.

We use simple fill-in forms under /admin, with required fields.  A small
list of HTML tags (e.g. <p>,<br>,<strong>,<i>,<a href="">) will be explained
to them, if they wish to format their information.  All styles are handled
by a stylesheet for them.

hth :)

rachel