By David Edward Clark
New CMS Sexiness
The Office of Communications is developing a content management system for oberlin.edu that will be open source. Student organizations, departments and offices will be able to intuitively develop and live edit their website without having to work through a labyrinth of back-end editing. User friendliness is their top priority.
Joseph Spiros, Oberlin College’s Web Developer, is currently at the testing stage of the project. He has been programming mostly full time since April, when the College decided it wanted a less complicated management system than its current .CMS platform.
The current system requires the user navigate their way through every folder and subfolder on the oberlin.edu website to locate their own. “When you go to manage your website, you’ve got this absolutely terrifying system,” said Spiros, while he demonstrated the difficulties with the current system. He clicked through three folders to get to a department page where he was confronted with a plethora of icons. He chose one, which opened up another page, which he then had to click again into another page to edit. “This is scary to people who don’t know a million things about a computer.” Under the new system, “you only see what’s relevant to you.”
The most fundamental difference between the two programs is the ability to live edit. Live editing is the ability to manage content exactly as it appears on a webpage as if you were surfing the web, without using a separate administrator’s window. You edit and save content as it would appear online.
“We’re hoping to get the open source release done within a month from now,” said Spiros. “Once that’s done, anybody will be about to test it out. We’re sort of relying on the community to do a lot of the testing for us and a lot of the debugging.” Once the code is well proven publicly, the college will switch their site over to the new system.
This is a great article. You’re way ahead of the other press on this, and I hadn’t heard much about it. Senate is working on creating an Office of Student Communications to assist with student publicity and outreach, as well as web design. This new system will help tremendously.
Luke, we’ll always be way ahead of the other press. Good seeing you last night.
Luke – welcome back! Lots of progress on student communications initiatives to fill you in on, we should grab lunch.
So Ben, you’re now using fearless and loathing to set up meetings?