[Daniel15]

I'd try CMS Made Simple. I used it years ago and it was pretty nice (a lot easier than Mambo/Joomla was at the time), it's probably even better these days.

Umbraco is also great if you're willing to host in a Windows Server environment (as it's .NET-based). It's used by several big companies (including Microsoft themselves).

Google Sites is actually pretty good these days too. It's a good option if they're already using Google Apps. At work, we used Umbraco for the online help, although it's recently been moved to Google Sites. I think the thinking was that since we're already paying for Google Apps licenses, we may as well use everything provided by Google. You can use your own subdomain with Google Sites.

[@Tom]

Okay I just posted on Neil's exactly similar question. Basically Wordpress is the biggest cms, then you could move over to Drupal or joomla both also in php.

Locomotive is fun and uses rails, little harder than Wordpress because of lack of add ons, though I never used any. Lastly blogging wise of you hate my others then have a small section of your site just for the blog. I gotta promote wheat here, I've used it and it's a cool node.js blog engine. Not supper complete but crazy fun. Calipso is a cutting edge of new cms that is also in node. Yea I like node but what ever you choose have a mobile site also.

Best of luck.

[SapporoGuy]

WP is still a blog with extras. If you use WP plan on focusing on spam

Drupal, awesome but it's more a "lego" for
Building sites. And just like regular Lego you just can't do circles and some other things.

I tend to use modx for a lot sites. It's more of a build it yourself type than Drupal or WP. AI the learning curve is higher but yet gives you lots of freedom.

Others: pass they are too old school.

You could always build something with YIi or other favorite flavor framework. But this all depends on how much commitment you want to make.

Why you leave them with will affect what that will have to go through once you leave. Go with something relatively unknown they are screwed. At least with a framework they can back track through what you did, but that could be a hassle too!

[cosmie]

Daniel15, on 25 March 2012 - 09:52 PM, said:

I'd try CMS Made Simple. I used it years ago and it was pretty nice (a lot easier than Mambo/Joomla was at the time), it's probably even better these days.

Umbraco is also great if you're willing to host in a Windows Server environment (as it's .NET-based). It's used by several big companies (including Microsoft themselves).

I'll be sure and check those out, thanks! The university is almost fully a Windows shop, so going with a .NET-based CMS would be very future proof, as the main IT staff would be able to assist if anything was needed (there's only a handful of Linux guys, and their services aren't available to individual departments) and they weren't lucky enough to have another technologically-inclined student to fund at subsidized wages.

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Okay I just posted on Neil's exactly similar question. Basically Wordpress is the biggest cms, then you could move over to Drupal or joomla both also in php.

Wordpress is definitely one that I'm thinking about, however I've heard stories of how involved updates/upgrades are. Is this true? If so, WordPress is out. Once I leave, I'll be lucky to teach someone step by step directions to get to an update button. Let alone teach them the nuances of a tricky upgrade, and how to rollback in case of problems..

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Locomotive is fun and uses rails, little harder than Wordpress because of lack of add ons, though I never used any. Lastly blogging wise of you hate my others then have a small section of your site just for the blog. I gotta promote wheat here, I've used it and it's a cool node.js blog engine. Not supper complete but crazy fun. Calipso is a cutting edge of new cms that is also in node. Yea I like node but what ever you choose have a mobile site also.

Cutting edge is a no-no. These people are using Dreamweaver and FrontPage at the moment, with broken links galore. If I ever leave and they don't have someone tech-savvy around to coddle them through upgrades, etc; they'll simply revert. And revert while still having an older, insecure version of the CMS running.

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I tend to use modx for a lot sites. It's more of a build it yourself type than Drupal or WP. AI the learning curve is higher but yet gives you lots of freedom.

This has crossed my path as an option. It seemed simple enough to do what most professor's will want to do with it, while allowing the flexibility necessary for someone more competent to customize when needed.

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You could always build something with YIi or other favorite flavor framework. But this all depends on how much commitment you want to make.

My actual designation is a teacher's assistant for a class. The website stuff has just been thrown at me once they realized I had a modicum of computer skills. So I want to minimize my commitment. I consider switching over to a CMS system a good investment for minimizing my commitment, as most of what I'm asked to do are arbitrarily easy if the requester only knew how to even access the content.

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Why you leave them with will affect what that will have to go through once you leave. Go with something relatively unknown they are screwed. At least with a framework they can back track through what you did, but that could be a hassle too!

This is something very important to me. Even with a framework they'd be screwed. The university provides Dreamweaver templates for departments to use (mandated, actually - unless you modify external software to mimic the templates). So once I left, they'd have limited resources to work with. OIT (main IT guys) would just tell them to use the standard Dreamweaver templates, rather than help fix anything. I have no intentions on leaving anytime in the foreseeable future, and may even transition to a full time staff position taking classes on the side (for free) within the next few months. But regardless of my tenure there, the system needs to be fairly self-sufficient. Something too customized isn't.

[Daniel15]

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The university is almost fully a Windows shop, so going with a .NET-based CMS would be very future proof, as the main IT staff would be able to assist if anything was needed

I'd probably go with Umbraco in this situation. University developers would be able to extend it if they ever needed to (if they know C# that is). The official ASP.NET website is powered by Umbraco.

However, if you're worried about them breaking the system or not keeping it up-to-date, perhaps consider Google Sites. It's hosted by Google so there's no chance of them breaking it. Either that or a CMS like CushyCMS (one I forgot to mention earlier)

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Wordpress is definitely one that I'm thinking about, however I've heard stories of how involved updates/upgrades are. Is this true? If so, WordPress is out.

Generally updates are fine, but sometimes they're a little tricky. WordPress has security issues from time to time as well, so keeping up-to-date is important.

I'm willing to bet that anything .NET-based will be more secure than a large PHP-based system. It's harder to write bad or insecure code using the .NET Framework as it generally encourages good practices

[Sephern]

Generally reading your requirements it seems like definitely the best way to go is to avoid them accessing markup or anything similar (Dreamweaver, Frontpage, etc) completely.

I'd definitely go with one of the options like Joomla (maybe not that solution exactly, but its the only one I've personally used - Daniels probably shows the most promise). That way they can modify their sites completely within the browser, which is a much smaller learning curve.

[callumacrae]

WordPress is good for smaller sites, but I would recommend Joomla! for larger sites, as WordPress is unbearable.

Again, if you're not an idiot then you shouldn't have a problem with spam.

[@Tom]

Coddle them through upgrades! Lmao

[SapporoGuy]

Sounds definitely like modx or WP!

[cosmie]

Turns out this is a moot point. As a department of the College of Business, we have to use the Dreamweaver templates provided by the College; even if I duplicated the look and feel of the Dreamweaver templates, I can't use a CMS as any updates to the templates wouldn't automatically update the CMS, so it'd be outside of their control. And the current templates are so crappy because every. single. decision must be made by a committee of various people in the College.

Ugh. *facesmack*

Back to table hell.

[SapporoGuy]

You could asknthem to evaluate their 10 year old decision and to consider turning part of their site into a "student internship" that would save money, save face -- what college wants to be known as behind the times, and become modern.

It all depends on how you bring this up

[TheMaster]

You should definately talk to them about getting it changed. "Static" pages just aren't all that common or worth while anyway, at least for sites that are constantly updated or changed.

Because they're used to creating new pages, a CMS like Joomla or Wordpress would be easy for them to adapt to, as they have page creation wizards (at least Joomla did when I used it last).

Explain to then the benefits, and I'm sure they'll understand it's more scalable and future proof. Especially of they plan on doing anymore rebranding. All you gotta do is change the template, not change every single page.

[cosmie]

SapporoGuy, on 02 April 2012 - 07:38 AM, said:

You could asknthem to evaluate their 10 year old decision and to consider turning part of their site into a "student internship" that would save money, save face -- what college wants to be known as behind the times, and become modern.

It all depends on how you bring this up

The college is comprised of 6-7 departments, and about 5 executive education programs. Each one of them does their own thing on the web, but have to follow the standard set by the college itself (which is bureaucratically decided by the individual departments). For all that, there is one full-time web developer designer in charge of templates/consistency, and each department has someone on staff that happens to know the basics of Dreamweaver. Any drastic change would take more than a student internship, and I already work full time at $20/hr doing a completely different job for a specific department. xD

TheMaster, on 07 May 2012 - 01:49 AM, said:

You should definately talk to them about getting it changed. "Static" pages just aren't all that common or worth while anyway, at least for sites that are constantly updated or changed.

Explain to then the benefits, and I'm sure they'll understand it's more scalable and future proof. Especially of they plan on doing anymore rebranding. All you gotta do is change the template, not change every single page.

Ah, that's where my argument falls flat. The way Dreamweaver templates work is that each page is linked to a template via Dreamweaver metadata. When you update a template file, it propagates all of those changes to the individual pages utilizing that template. So the end product is static pages, but they're semi-scalable via Dreamweaver's automated template propagation. The only time where this fails is with major website revisions, which has only happened once at my university. And the colleges use that as an excuse to clean out the servers, anyway.


However, I may be able to convince them to utilize Umbraco, at least partially. Several departments have been wanting to have a blog, but the only current solution is to have a wordpress-hosted blog, which colleges are weary about content being out of their control.

[SapporoGuy]

Why bother? Static HTML pages tend to be more secure. Also, they've set aside a budget that they can't change.

If you're really keen on helping, propse to them an X amount of hours more a month they would need to accomplish this and then wait for the new budget

Departments love to increase their budgets!

[cosmie]

Static pages may be the most secure, but allowing enumerable people FTP access is not (faculty update their faculty bio pages, upload docs for class help, etc). One professor accidentally uploaded his entire user folder (My Documents, Pictures, Videos, Desktop) without even realizing it when he meant to upload a PDF. Plus, they're already looking for a hosted blog solution. If they begin by using a full CMS, they can later expand from just a blog module and encompass all content.

As for a budget, I'm in the College of Business. They've received over $100 million in Alumni donations over the past three years, and have MBA programs costing over $75,000/year. The College (not my specific department) budget has enough wiggle room to do anything they feel like.

[SapporoGuy]

Sure they probably have a good cash flow but it's about how the budget is set for the year. There probably is a slush fund that will need to be jettisoned to ensure next year the department will have the same amount or more for next year.

However, you mention several departments. That means the budget allocation moves up a notch to the campus level.

You might be able to convince your main department to use an internal version. Other departments will catch on and then you might have a chance escalating to department that will be able to make the call.

If you really want to follow up on this, query the multiple departments in their needs and then try to convince 1 to try a pilot system.

Hmmm, you should look at alfresco. It has a document management system and if I remeber right, they now have and external facing app.

Sad, but it sounds like your campus's decisions is a disaster waiting to happen

Hmmm, check out alfresco! WP and the rest don't sound like they actually fit your campus's needs.

[Fike]

concrete5.

[SapporoGuy]

Nice but they need a fuller stack, hence alfresco.

[Fike]

SapporoGuy, on 11 May 2012 - 02:40 AM, said:

Nice but they need a fuller stack, hence alfresco.

They use Zend, has commercial backing which is nice I guess.