Writing a website specification - how to manage content, though?

[cheredenine]

I'm in the early stages of writing a website specification for an upcoming revamp of our school's website. Our previous one is a bit of a mess, something i had put down to an old fashioned layout and the fact that the web-based content management system wasn't very non-IT-savy user friendly. I had imagined using a similar method for the new one, but having ready a mention of Adobe Contribute, i'm wondering if a locally installed bit of software to manage content generation and uploading might give better results?

 

What sort of systems are in use out there - anyone have any suggestions? I'd ideally like a system friendly to non-technical users as i don't want to get collared making all the changes all the time...

[Domino]

Have you considered joomla?

 

Its a very user friendly web based CMS, and a lot of our members have made great use of it

 

Software's all good and well, but a properly fully featured CMS allows anyone with access to update the website from any machine, which is nice as you can allow the PE department to update sports, etc,etc

[cheredenine]

Having a look at Joomla now - just waiting for a demo account to be set up. For some reason i'd always assumed it was VLE related like Moodle, so i was initially suspicious... A brief look at their website suggests it might indeed be useful; hopefully a go with the demo site will tell me definitively. The website spec is being produced ready to be issued to a third party company, so i need to be sure Joomla is suitable/appropriate before asking our new site to be built with it in mind...

[pwds]

Second Joomla- I'm still playing with it but it has some extremely powerful modules for news, calendars and events. The best part for us (I'm actually doing it for a Church) is the modules that allow us to list events of a certain catagory taken from the calendar on the relevant page (thus always up to date- at least if the calendar is), a newsflash for highlighted information, and for articles to expire at a certain time (great for events).

 

As a lone and unpaid webmaster I didn't want to be in a situation where new events were taking two weeks to go up and then four weeks to come back down afterwards!

 

Using Joomla it's easy for Church staff to add their own news and events via the web interface which helps the website stay relevant and engage with the community.

 

Be prepared to pay anything up to $50 for modules to do some of the more sophisticated bits, but if you are so minded you should be able to put together the entire website for free.

 

Don't forget to check out the Edugeek Joomla template (I'd recommend downloading it and extracting the template, then uploading that to an existing Joomla install as this version and the associated modules are out of date and may include components you do not require).

[rlweb]

Have a look at CMS Made Simple. CMS Made Simple - Open Source Content Management System Very simple and you can easily code your modules if you know a little php.

[Stuart_C]

Our's is build on Drupal. It's OK and I belive it's open source

[Hightower]

See, we use Joomla here - but I would say it's far from user friendly (talking in terms of non-technical "what's a network cable" members of staff). It's great for us to update as we know our way around. But hand it to staff (in its bare form) and they'd got lost in a second.

 

If I was going to allow staff to update pages I would code a custom website which was more restricted - allowed staff to change/add info but kept any added info to a strict theme. At moment it's too easy for them to change the font face, size, or weight. And when each page has different style fonts it just looks unprofessional.