Skip to main content

Digging deeper into CMS requirements (#2: Management Requirements)

This is the second post about digging deeper into content management requirements. See also

I meant to write some more and original stuff that's floating around inside my head these days, but the weekend was spent in a winter resort with work (we tried kiting, snow rafting, ruled the after-ski and had a great time otherwise).

I'm a bit worn out at the moment, so here's a quick paste from what I've written on CMS requirements earlier, detailing out the parts I've put in the category management requirements.

Management Requirements

The person or persons who will be spending the most time on the web-site are no doubt the ones responsible for managing the online content, be it a company clerk, a webmaster or a chief information/content/knowledge officer. If this user does not find the CMS practical and usable, the content will quickly stagnate, and site traffic drop.

Creation

For the authors, the most important functionality of the CMS is the composition of articles. This is where content is assembled. Advanced composition features a WYSIWIG-editor, spell checking, insertion of images and hyperlinks and the ability to create tables, all this in an efficient and user-friendly fashion (not like the way Blogger's editor is agitating me right now with its crappy undo-functionality).

Publishing

Publishing is the process of taking the content from the author and making it available online. It should also be possible to later edit published pages, as well as taking them off line, hiding them from public view without deleting them. The last point is actually part of the workflow requirement presented below.

Workflow

This is a feature of WCMS featuring several authors and perhaps an editorial staff. A web-page or document has status which perhaps only certain individuals are authorized to change, for example the editor accepting an article for publishing. Time-limits are also part of the workflow. One page can be scheduled to go on- or off line at a given point in time.

Administration

When web-site structure grows complex, there appears a need to administer the larger amounts of content, and which users are privileged to do which actions. User, role or group access rights must be managed. The administration is generally what the content manager is doing besides creating content.


I also considered including access control, as many content administrators are obsessed with micro-managing who gets to see what (more typical situation on an intranet), but I'll blog more on what I think about that another day.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant

Encrypting and Decrypting with Spring

I was recently working with protecting some sensitive data in a typical Java application with a database underneath. We convert the data on its way out of the application using Spring Security Crypto Utilities . It "was decided" that we'd be doing AES with a key-length of 256 , and this just happens to be the kind of encryption Spring crypto does out of the box. Sweet! The big aber is that whatever JRE is running the application has to be patched with Oracle's JCE  in order to do 256 bits. It's a fascinating story , the short version being that U.S. companies are restricted from exporting various encryption algorithms to certain countries, and some countries are restricted from importing them. Once I had patched my JRE with the JCE, I found it fascinating how straight forward it was to encrypt and decrypt using the Spring Encryptors. So just for fun at the weekend, I threw together a little desktop app that will encrypt and decrypt stuff for the given password

What I've Learned After a Month of Podcasting

So, it's been about a month since I launched   GitMinutes , and wow, it's been a fun ride. I have gotten a lot of feedback, and a lot more downloads/listeners than I had expected! Judging the numbers is hard, but a generous estimate is that somewhere around 2000-3000 have listened to the podcast, and about 500-1000 regularly download. Considering that only a percentage of my target audience actively listen to podcasts, these are some pretty good numbers. I've heard that 10% of the general population in the western world regularly listen to podcasts (probably a bit higher percentage among Git users), so I like to think I've reached a big chunk of the Git pros out there. GitMinutes has gathered 110 followers on Twitter, and 63, erm.. circlers on Google+, and it has received 117 +'es! And it's been flattr'ed twice :) Here are some of the things I learned during this last month: Conceptually.. Starting my own sandbox podcast for trying out everythin

The academical approach

Oops, seems I to published this post prematurely by hitting some Blogger keyboard shortcut. I've been sitting for some minutes trying to figure out how to approach the JavaZone talk mentioned in my previous blog-post. Note that I have already submitted an abstract to the comittee, and that I won't publish the abstract here in the blog. Now of course the abstract is pretty detailed on what the talk is going to be about, but I've still got some elbow room on how to "implement" the talk. I will use this blog as a tool to get my aim right on how to present the talk, what examples to include, what the slides should look like, and how to make it most straightforward and understandable for the audience. Now in lack of having done any presentations at a larger conference before, I'm gonna dig into what I learned at the University, which wasn't very much, but they did teach me how to write a research paper, a skill which I will adapt into creating my talk: The one

Git Stash Blooper (Could not restore untracked files from stash)

The other day I accidentally did a git stash -a , which means it stashes *everything*, including ignored output files (target, build, classes, etc). Ooooops.. What I meant to do was git stash -u , meaning stash modifications plus untracked new files. Anyhows, I ended up with a big fat stash I couldn't get back out. Each time I tried, I got something like this: .../target/temp/dozer.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/core.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/joda-time.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/foo.war already exists, no checkout Could not restore untracked files from stash No matter how I tried checking out different revisions (like the one where I actually made the stash), or using --force, I got the same error. Now these were one of those "keep cool for a second, there's a git way to fix this"situation. I figured: A stash is basically a commit. If we look at my recent commits using   git log --graph --