CIL 2012 Day 1 - Content Management Challenges for Websites

For quite some time we've been in need of a new content management system for our primary website, and although several years ago after our last redesign I had for a variety of reasons largely discarded the idea of using Drupal, I am slowly being drawn in that direction as we look to another round of professional redesign of the website, hopefully in the coming year.

As a result I decided to go to this session on content management systems for libraries.  It was divided into two presentations.  The first presentation was presented by Stephen Sanzo, the Director of Marketing and Business Development at Isovera, a web consulting firm specializing in Drupal and libraries.

Mr. Sanzo presented a balanced overview of the open source content management scene with a library focus covering the top three content management systems - Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla.  His observations for these systems were the following:

Wordpress

Pros:

• Installs easy – up and running quickly
• Polished interface – easy for novice to add text and images
• Site administration (installing upgrades, add features) fairly easy
• Library community includes OpenLibrary and faceted search features

Cons:

• Very limited structural flexibility for core system
• Limited support for user roles
• Fewer library features than Drupal

Summary – a good choice for smaller and structurally simple sites.

Joomla

Pros:

• Good “all around” system
• Strong insfrastructure to support sites of different sizes

Cons:

• Limited flexibility in structuring content types
• Cumbersome to update
• Limited features for libraries

Summary – strong but not very flexible when thinking outside the box

Drupal

Pros:

• Flexible and powerful – it's a development platform
• Robust capabilities for Web 2.0 and community functionality
• Easy to update content
• Strong library community with many library-related features

Cons:

• Confuguring site is complex – may need outside help (easier with Drupal 7 and also Drupal Gardens from Acquia)
• Flexibility – many ways to skin a cat. Need to think through what is best.

Summary – robust and flexible, provides most upside. Often need assistance to realize full poetential. Custom-built to be enterprise-scale: flexible, powerful and responsive to most needs.

Mr. Sanzo also provided these questions that everyone should ask when deciding on a CMS:

 

• Determine level of customization
• What are your workflow needs
• Talk to others
• Read, research, and try them out
• Know your own “must-have's” and “like-to-have's”

In the end Mr. Sanzo expressed a clear preference for Drupal, although this is certainly not unusual in the field (see the list of libraries that use Drupal) and is certainly defensible.  Although I was familiar to some level or another with all three products I got value from this overview and got me thinking a bit about our redesign process and ways that we might be able to address not only problems with the main website, but also problems with the intranet website using a Drupal solution.

Following Mr. Sanzo was a presentation from Jennifer Heise from Drew University titled "Blended Content Management for an Academic Library Website."

This talk largely covered how an academic library managed to get a lot of the things they needed out of a Wordpress installation. Not being in the same situation this portion wasn't as interesting to me, but I was intrigued by the mention of an open-source web-based chat widget called LibraryH3lp. This seems to work with Spark and Openfire and could be useful in reworking our chat system to make it more effective, so for that this half of the session was worthwhile.