And so begins the final day of SXSWi from Austin…
####################################################
3/11 10:00 am – Content Management System Roundup
George DeMet (Palantir.net), Jeff Eaton (Lullabot – Drupal developer), Tiffany Farriss (Palantir.net), Mike Essl (mike.essl.com), Matthew McDermott (Catapult Systems)
Sharepoint (McDermott)
- Suite of products, starts with free module but web content management component is MOSS 2007 Standard (commercial product)
- Who’s on it? Bloggers, small companies, rogue schools, some web 2.0 dabblers, large organizations, some countries (multi-lingual capabilities)
- Design perspective – take a site, decide common elements => master page, other elements are page layouts (editable)
- Sharepoint designer: code view, WSYIWYG, can be extended, preview screen; pages can be created by designers (doesn’t require developer skillset)
- Authoring view: DHTML menus, pickers for photo assets, spellchecking inside UI, drive content authoring down to business users who should be writing and push it through workflow
- Supported by IE and FF
- Approval process – parallel supported
- Conditional approach for branching logic in workflow
- Search out of the box; pages documents and people, keywords and best bets, hit highlighting, did you mean? correction, thesaurus and relevance ranking, fully XSL compliant
- Supports variations: multi-lingual functionality by spinning up duplicate site (does not automatically translate), makes ready for translation, pushes pages through workflow
- Can have mobile variation – different CSS, different design
- The Intranet: people and personalization, document mgmt, collaboration, line of business integration, search, mysites (profiles), colleague tracker
- Also supports command line
- Rich CMS platform, search, nav and breadcrumbs, authentication options, personalization, multilingual, social networking
Drupal (Eaton)
- Open source: built by the people who use it (hobbyists, businesses, volunteers, Belgians)
- Large number of different kinds of sites use it (blogs, magazines like fastcompany.com, community-based sites, Lifetime TV, artists sites, MTV.co.uk, UN’s EndPoverty, Inc mag, US mag, Zuda, The Onion, PopSugar – the point is that Drupal can use just about any crazy-looking design that a Photoshop designer throws at developers)
- Under the hood (LAYERS, top-down):
– Theme (XHMTL, CSS – design)
– Views of content (blog, calendar, gallery)
– Content (blog posts, news, wiki pages)
– Users (editors, administrators)
– Modules/
– Drupal Core (login, search, security, etc.)
- Doesn’t treat content as “pages” – all lumped together regardless of format
- Can have completely different mobile look in Theme layer
- Theme it ships with is basically a blog
- Allows to create custom content types, adding modules, layering
- Drupal isn’t what you need if you: just want to build a page, build the next Twitter, static sites, just another blog
- Drupal rocks if you want: user-generated content, communities, many kinds of content, many views of content, open APIs, web standards
Expression Engine (Essl)
- Mr. T and Me site - example
- Note: NO custom php on the site anywhere, so that site shows what you can do out-of-the-box
- Essl prefaced that he has little technical knowledge, but has been able to do everything he’s ever wanted to do with a web site out of the box
- All XHTML/CSS standards-compliant
- Easy to create custom fields for custom types of content
- EE is a paid product – $200+ for commercial license entry point
- Paid support staff on the forums because of commercial nature of product; offers built-in support for clients if developers don’t want to support permanently
- Essl is running about 20 sites on EE right now – check his site for links to variety of sites to see implementation
- Majestic Research site – actual EE implementation took 7 hours.
Evolution of CMS Choices (T. Farriss)
- Palantir will use whatever CMS meets needs of client
Art Institute of Chicago:
Round 1: Dreamweaver site + custom CMS (custom php/mySQL)
- Pros: Quick and easy: two month process – discrete, simple scope
- Cons: navigation, difficult to extend, support: interim solutions rarely are interim
Round 2: Serena Collage
- Tweaked design, some changes, left it table-based
- Collage has nice master page structure
- WCMS – on enterprise side
- Contribution layouts where you put in instructional code
- Very metadata-driven
- Created image asset type to randomize image
- Pros: master pages, workflow, version control, breadcrumbs, links as assets, deployed static files, training contributors
- Cons: expensive licensing costs, excruciatingly slow interface, not Mac-friendly, navigation, training developers, interfered with php code, no support for dynamic framework, end-of-life product (?!)
Round 3: Drupal
- Tweaked all collections, Drupal is controlling menus now, related content, extra media types
- Interactive features, leveraging Drupal’s jQuery integration
- Needed individually-customized major exhibition sites (needed fresh design on the fly, without major design process), can create exhbitions from back end
- Pros: powerful templating, remote data handling, user management, jQuery integration, solid flexible framework, ability to write own modules
- Cons: reverse proxy difficult in D5, uncertainty of release of D6, one-off exceptions are difficult
QUESTIONS/COMMENTS
Drupal:
- Drupal is like building with legos – can create really cool stuff, but you have to learn how to do so and it takes effort
- Takes time to dive in and come up to speed to build a complex web site with Drupal
- It rocks when you put those things together, but takes time and experimentation w/Drupal
- Do you find yourself trying to guide clients to existing modules or create from scratch? It depends on needs – sometimes it’s best to create from scratch, and if it’s useful, it goes back to the community as a whole for reuse.
- Workflow module: Actions and Workflow allow you to set up states that content can be in, control who has access to change it
- Tradeoff between building something to automate tasks for non-developers and just building it
Costs:
- SharePoint: based on how many people accessing it on intranet, flat price of $25k for external deployment, educational institutions get enormous discount
- Drupal: product is free, but will need developers to build, so costs involve paying for time of developers
- EE: personal license for blog ~$100, commercial license ~$200-250; pay subscription fee for code. If huge update, may have to buy in again. Comes with paid support staff.
- Custom CMS: services model, pay for time
- Collage: license single install $12k, $80 to 100-200k to buy Collage free and clear
####################################################
3/11 11:30 am – Core Conversation: Next Generation Education: Bringing the New Web to Campus
Samuel Felder (USC)
*** Note: More open-format conversation than presentation, with a large number of higher ed folks around the round table. I’ll record key points of discussion.
- Idea is to learn from what’s going on on the web at large outside of higher ed, and how we can take that stuff back to campus to improve our work.
- This is a mindshift – look to tech industry as a whole instead of to other universities for “what’s next”
- USC’s team: colleges and divisions are free to do what they want, outside of narrow visual identity guides; central web group did central projects for PR; other work is competitive, in that no one had to use their services. Structured in central IT.
- Because no one HAS to use central group, they organized web council, paralleled on web site, pattern library on Yahoo library; on central services, they rearchitected as open APIs and code libraries, educated the campus on best practices
- Many universities represented seem to have similiar structure and challenges – central webcomm group that is responsible for home page/top-level sites but not resourced to do everyone on campus’s sites, and that style guide is strongly recommended but not enforced
- UCLA does have centralized web group, but perceived as too slow. CMS helped get things up and running more quickly in International division, now central group trying to bring that to general campus.
- Why not use Facebook, Flickr APIs, etc in .edu’s? Implied commercial endorsement, what happens when something you’re using becomes uncool (Myspace)
- Two sides: looking for outside services to leverage, and prioritizing internal development resources
- If resources are allocated to purchasing/maintaining big locked-down products, harder to respond quickly to change
- It’s about understanding measureable goals and value-added
- Branding -> Not necessarily the logo police, but building in a way that respects the brand
- One interesting discussion: making the online catalog a collaborative environment, i.e. a wiki. Some schools are enabling departments/colleges to update online catalog on the fly. Of course, the issue here is authentication for who has rights to do so, and ensuring some sort of completeness and accuracy.
####################################################
3/11 2:00 pm – Mexican Manifesto
Sharron Rush (Knowbility.org), Marta Sylvia del Rio (Universidad de Monterrey), Javier Hernandez (Gobierno del Estado de Nuevo Leon)
*** What this is about: “The Usability and Accessibility for the Web International Seminar, organized by the State Government of Nuevo Le-n and the Universidad de Monterrey, was held in July 26 2007. At the conclusion of the two-day conference, the organizers issued the first Manifesto on Usability and Accessibility for Mexican Government Websites. With input from conference participants and experts of UA web 2007, the Manifesto was signed by 23 Mexican states and 3 municipalities. The Manifesto states that , ‘It is the duty of the creators and administrators of new technologies to improve people’s quality of life. As administrators, our objective is to create and maintain websites that are both useful and easy to use for the widest possible audience: usable and accessible websites. We believe that government, academia and the private sector should work together to achieve this objective.’ “
- Brought in representatives from each state in government to discuss accessibility
Their ten-point approach:
Our commitment
- To ensure the democratic access to government information and services by everyone, including users with disabilities, by embracing W3C recommendations
- To facilitate the creation, archival and management of information with systems that are accessible
- To ensure that information and services are easy to find, discover and use, following best practices in web design and development
- To ensure the transparency of public information, and specifically information on the use of public resources
- To facilitate and promote citizen participation in governmental decisions, as well as collaboration between governments
- To promote the convergence of systems in the national, state and local levels so that users can navigate between them without barriers
- To take full advantage of information technologies to better serve citizens
- To make content easy for everyone to understand by following Lenguaje Ciudadano (plain language) recommendations.
- To promote the ideals and concepts expressed in this manifesto
- To continuously improve the methodologies referred to in this document
- Revolutionary because it was agreed upon by a large number of municipal and state governments
####################################################
3/11 3:30 pm – Creative Collaboration: Building Web Apps Together
Paul Hammond (Flickr), Simon Willison, George Oates (Flickr), Matt Biddulph (Dopplr), Dave Shea (mezzoblue.com, CSS Zen Garden)
Premise: designers and developers working together to optimize results
Dopplr
- Likes to get new features online as quickly as possible, and work with them like clay going forward; Live testing
- Sculpting, not painting
A parallel work flow with Django
- Developers design the underlying data model
- Automated admin interface allows content producers to start entering data straight away
- Meanwhile, developers are building the logic for the public-facing pages
- Developers hand stub templates to designer (friendly template language)
- This works great for sites that are defined by their data
Flickr – initially, they were “release early, release often”. As they grew, that’s become less practical because of the size of the community and the differences in the type of feedback they received from their community.
Developers find that it works much better if there’s collaboration very early in the process, because the most frustrating thing is being given a spec and told to build it. Include developers in wireframing and whiteboarding. Sit in the same room.
From a designers’ standpoint, same type of issue is being told “here’s a site – redesign it by tweaking CSS”.
As developers and designers, what can we do to help those we work with understand what we do?
- Has everything to do with how design is put together, and having members from all areas together designing it, then it works better.
- Prototying is very useful here – barebones HTML that works with live data – because it speaks to both types of minds (designer and developer)
- Developers know what’s POSSIBLE in many cases, so helpful to include them early
Willison: in my experience, best projects have been small teams of generalists (people with variety of skills)
Biddulph: important to have specialists in certain areas
Filed under: Conferences, Resources | Tagged: SXSW
