Desired features

Discussion about desired features for Bates’ next content management system

Jay Collier (5/97): This is a first draft which will be receiving more attention. If you’d like to make suggestions, please do so within [brackets].

The optimal Web content management system provide the following features at the lowest total cost of ownership. Note, I consider dependability (from infrastructure) to be the top priority.

The features are listed in order of Web Communications priority by JC (9/26/07). [Notes added 10/24/07, 10/25]

Content authoring and editing

• Be easy to use (with little training) for all user groups from novices to administrators, including image, media, document, and form publishing.
  • Provide interface that is customized for each group; i.e. authors see few options, editors see more, interface designers see more, etc. [jc, 10/25/3007]
  • Copy/paste tables from Excel and Word, with resulting code that is semantic and consistent across browsers.
• Provide a cross-platform, standards-compliant Web browser interface for in-place authoring, editing, and approval, with no required downloads.
  • [This shouldn't be a requirement. It forces us to give up desirable behaviors while authoring and editing. Instead, we should define specifically what we mean by "easy to use". jah]
  • [I'd turn that around and ask: what are the desirable behaviors that require an installed client. I'm not aware of any, but would be interested in knowing about them.  I'm starting with the assumption that the installation of any additional software is harder to manage ... and harder to use. jc]
  • [iCMS Publisher provides a number of features that use ActiveX and, thus, Internet Explorer. Some examples are:
    • drag'n'drop of components and pages into elements of other components and pages,
    • drag'n'drop moving of folders and files in the site tree, including a modifier key to switch between "move" and "copy", andright-click menus.   jah, 25 May 2007]
    • Can’t drag and drop be provided via javascript? I don’t one has to use ActiveX for those functions [jc 10/24/07]
  • [Other systems may provide such functionality without the need for proprietary downloads, so why don't we keep the question live until we find out? jc 5/31/07]
• Associate all content with owners and generate automatic e-mail reminders for stale content.
  • In addition to content expiration, provide audit content on a regular basis [jc 10/24/07]
• Allow pasting code from external services into editable area without code rewrite.
  • Such as Web pages, URL for video and image embedding [jc 10/24/07]
• Public events (see detailed criteria at Public calendar – evaluation criteria)

• Manage the official public events listings for [public events of] recognized workgroups, departments, and organizations. [update, jc 10/24/07]
• Allow tracking of both public and private group events.
• Support a wide variety of event attributes, including multiple sponsors and multiple categories.
• Multiple views: from filtered and sorted lists based on metadata, or daily, weekly, and monthly views — via Web browser or PDA.
• Provide simple administrative, editorial, and publishing processes. [Preference is to use the same work flow process as with other content types. jc 10/24/07]
• Exchange data with other calendar management systems (including facilities scheduling). [including iCal, hcal microformats, and services such as Upcoming.org and Google Calendar. jc 10/24/07]
• Allow multiple views based on any event or group attribute, including group, category, date, and author.

[This is a calendaring application. It's a separate issue from a CMS. It can be done with any major CMS I know of. But, there are many stand-alone calendaring applications that we should look at. They may well have a richer feature set. jah]

[If these functions are available in one CMS, why deploy two systems? At least two contenders provide these features. jc]

[Let's elucidate all of the requirements in the Public calendar - evaluation criteria. jah]

Support

• End-user documentation and extensive system administration support is available.
• Company/development community has a multi-year track record with more than 100 sites implemented.
  • [Rationale behind the number 100? jah]
  • [Order of magnitude would be 1, 10, 100, 1000. 10 seems too few. 1000 seems too high. 100 worked fine for my last content management system discovery project. It dropped out some of the less established systems. jc]
• Installation/configuration target to public Web presence for higher education.
  • [Community of higher education professionals preferred. jc 10/24/2007]

Collaboration

• Allow moderated comments (from members of the Bates community) on defined node types, such as only news articles.
  • [Rationale? jah]
  • [A CMS that supports chronologically-organized nodes could support news items and blog entries. We should consider the ability to activate comments on such nodes. More national news publishers are doing so — most recently, USA Today online — and we would benefit by planning that possibility for 2-3 years down the road. jc]
• Allow multiple authors to contribute to defined pages or sections of content.
• Require an approval stage for defined pages or sections before publishing to the live server.

Information architecture

• Generate content that adheres to semantic Web and universal usabilty standards and which can be easily shared and borrowed.
• Provide both drill-down (traditional) and chronological (news feeds, newsletters, podcasts) architectures.
• Import and export content essence and structure for re-architecture projects.
  • [Please expand on this. jah]
  • We should be able to develop sections of content outside the CMS — in an authoring client or legacy CMS — and import them into the system. Same goes for export. This significantly reduces the architecture time. jc]
• Simple drag-and-drop for pages and sections during content restructuring. [And taxonomies, jc 10/24/2007]
• Allow users to subscribe to content updates via RSS and e-mail.
  • [There are external tools that do this for anyone who wants to. see http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/monitor.htm jah]
  • [Yes, there are numerous outboard services for this. I had an integrated subscription system, with a single dashboard and log-on for ease of use. jc]
  • [Also, the ability to subscribe, via e-mail or RSS, to nested taxonomies allows a person to customize their "view" of the college. jc 10/24/2007]
• Provide meaningful URLs —
  which allow structured site maps for search engine optimization.
  • [Generate different path algorithms depending on taxonomy or content type, including full or partial paths and chronology (/2007/10/01/title) jc 10/24/2007]
• Generate automatic moved-page (and moved-section) redirects.
  • [Once we have component-based content, this problem will go away. Any page's content can change, without redirection, because there will be only one page type. jah]
  • [To do an extensive rearchitecture, it makes most sense to duplicate an entire system and create a prototype for iterative development and approval. Even if content essence comes from a component, there would still be an entirely new set of x-numbered pages that need to be redirected. jc]
    • [x-numbered pages is an Ingeniux thing. Nonetheless, restructuring would probably eliminate some or all of the old URLs.  So the redirects are necessary. jh 1/4/07]
  • [Another option is to use information from the redirected URL in an automated, faceted search; especially useful if old path include title words, jc 10/24/07]
• Provide intuitive click-through service integrated with Web stats analysis to allow tracking of e-mail responses.
  • [Provide customized results from within the system with information that is not monitored by external services. jc 10/24/07]

Interface design

• Cleanly separate content and presentation through simple presentation templating.
  • [Preferred: system that allows non-technical staff (i.e. interface desigers) to add block code to HTML skeleton structure. jc 10/24/07]
• Support cross-platform, standards-compliant Web interface.
• Allow for a multi-tiered identity system, across subsites and subdomains.
  • [Please explain what "nested identity system" means. jah]
  • [In such a system, each page is styled by design elements (colors, shapes, text, navigation) from various higher levels. One example would be a site for the Class of 2011. It  would have design elements from the overall College, then Admissions, then the class itself. They would all work together. And this would need to work, even if those subsites are in separate subdomains. JC]
  • [If this last feature could be implemented through cascaded CSS sheets that can be placed "on top" of a main theme via GUI, all the better The ultimate would be to be able to apply sheets based on URL paths, taxonomy elements, or by section jc 10/24 & 25/2007]

Subscription

• Provide multiple options for notification of updates, including e-mail, RSS, and iCal feeds (for events). [Also, taxonomies, including nested terms. jc 10//24/07]

Audience segmentation

Realm: Public internet, Campus intranet, External vendor extranet, audience portals.

• Limit page editing, site structure, and workflow functions to specified user groups.
• Provide capacity to restrict pages, sections, and subsites to easily-defined groups.

Client relationship management

• Track activities and progress of prospective students, deliver personalized content via Web and e-mail [10/25/2007]

Mailing list management

• Mailing list subscriptions
• Create and send mailings

Infrastructure

• Allow custom development environment for integrating external modules.
  • [Actively share development tasks with developer community. jc 10/24/07]
• Scale to support a large number of discrete sites and subdomains, yet provide integrated navigation, such as site maps.
  • [What system can provide integrated navigation across discrete sites? If one can, do the discrete sites have different users, a distinct virtual domain, etc.? jah]
  • [Unless I am mistaken, all the systems I've investigated can integrate sites in different subdomains with one instance, with shared users. My previous CMS had no problem with it. jc]
• Support emerging technologies and standards.
• Provide extensive data exchange capabilities, including content import and export, and content sharing among pages.