Penn State University Libraries Initial Content Management Investigation, Spring 2003

Who We Are University Libraries Department for Information Technologies (I-Tech) Dept. of about 10 people working with staff technology training, technical support, and R&D Partner with ITS/Digital Library Technologies on many initiatives

Libraries- LIAS Home Page

Our Environment Thousands of Libraries-produced Web pages – and counting “Organic” development where each unit has strong feelings about both its content and the presentation (look and feel) Growing recognition that a functional Web site needs to have usability, coherence, good navigability, search features, etc.

What we’re Not doing in this investigation Choosing a content management system for the Libraries Web site Expecting our demo product to be “the answer”

What we Are doing in this investigation Gaining some basic expertise in CMS among staff in I-Tech Developing a means for demo’ing the content management philosophy of Web development to our colleagues

What we had to work with Strong desire to investigate the content management concept No $$ Busy developers, minimal time to spend Development server available for R&D Our own department Web site as a test bed

Planning for a speedy development process Found interest group in the department Surveyed available resources Developed checklist of features (deal breakers, desirable, optional) Developed list of open source products Developed ambitious timeline

Critical requirements for our test CMS software product Open source (or very low cost licensing) Work with current infrastructure App server – Cold Fusion or PHP Web server – Apache or IIS Database – MySQL, Access, SQL server Work in Windows 2000/XP environment

“Nice to have” User support community for open source Compliance with accessibility guidelines Admin & user customization Levels of permission granularity Easy updating Support for other devices (pda’s etc.) Multi-language capability Etc.

Process and Timeline

Completed checklist example

Content Management with phpWebSite Requires MySQL, Apache, and PHP. Meets the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative requirements

Core Features [as printed on the website] phpWebSite allows an individual or group to easily maintain an interactive, community-driven web site. In fact, you're using it right now. A brief summary of features is outlined below: Easy, web-based administration - minimal computer experience is needed to maintain site content. Flexible layout control - site page layout can be changed at anytime. Catagory-based content - organize site information by category with automatic related information. Interactive content - visitors can post comments, submit announcements and web links. Customized user experience - themes allow each vistor to customize the web site for his or her preferences or special needs. XHTML and WAI compliance - we are committed to meeting XHTML 1.0 specifications by our 1.0 release. Current errors are minimal if any. Expendable content - through announcements, blocks, pages, dynamic forms generation, calendar, comments, photoalbums, FAQ, and polls.

User and Administrator Settings

Personal Settings (Users) –Layout (theme selection) –Language (set user’s default language) –Announcements (create an announcement) –Notes (create and send notes) –Comments (set method and display of comments)

User and Administrator Settings Authorized groups and administrators –Content, security, and core modules are for authorized groups and administrators. Changes made to these functions set the default theme, layout, and active modules for all users.

I-Tech Modules I-Tech has activated these modules so far: –User Login –Announcements –Articles (I-Tech staff, training, welcome) –FAQs (technical, training, informational) –User survey (poll) –Calendar of events

Submitting News Authorized groups and administra- tors can submit news and set an expiration date to send the announcement to a searchable archive.

I-Tech Article Announcements and articles also allow the insertion of images.

FAQs Set FAQ categories. Displayed next to each category is the number of questions and answers for that category.

FAQs Click the category, select the question and view the answer.

FAQs Each FAQ includes an option for the reader to score the helpfulness of the FAQ. A search box is available to search the FAQ database.

Calendar The site also includes a Calendar of Events. The highlighted dates cue the reader that there are events scheduled.

Calendar Clicking highlighted event takes the reader to details of the event

Calendar To submit an event, an authorized user clicks the submit event button and fills in the detailed boxes of the event screen.

“Live” page from Appalachian State

Still to do Finish installing modules Figure out how it all works Expand our available dept. content Start to demo the concept

What we’ve learned so far Advance planning is probably the most important step in successful large-scale change People like the idea of templates; wide diversity of opinion about what that means in practice Creating buy-in will be a gradual process

Future? For us, any content management decision will be complex - many players - what systems (open source or commercial) would scale to our needs? - time and $$ - availability in library world of some customized commercial products with some of the features of a CMS

Contact info: Linda Friend Brian Hoffman (Database Admin/Webmaster) Penn State University Libraries Dept. for Information Technologies 102 Paterno Library, University Park, PA 814/