Hyperviews Online

Anne Gentle has provided a list of wikis she has found that are used for product documentation or to provide new and updates about software products.

Bill Dranall is exploring the relationship between content management and information design in the Orange County STC (OCSTC) newsletter, TechniScribe. The current installment is on page 6 of the December, 2007 issue:  http://www.ocstc.org/pdf/ts122007.pdf

Online Information 2007 Conference. London. December 4-6, 2007.  http://www.online-information.co.uk/online07/index.html

Adobe Systems Incorporated announces Adobe Technical Communication Suite software, an integrated solution for authoring, managing, and publishing technical information and training in multiple formats and languages.

The suite includes Adobe RoboHelp 7 as well as Adobe FrameMaker 8, Adobe Captivate 3 and Adobe Acrobat 3D Version 8 software.

by Anne Gentle

Is your webmaster feeling the pressure of being the single point of contact for website updates? Do your members go to the website looking for answers to a few simple questions only to find archived PDF newsletters from the early 2000s? Even if you answered no to both of these questions, a website design with a collaboration-enabled content management system can help you serve local members and also share the tasks of writing new and updating current content.

Fortunately, there are web content management systems available to webmasters to help effectively manage a local STC website when your members’ expectations for a website are reaching new heights every year. This article shares the research that a small team did while working on a redesign of the STC Austin web site in the summer of 2007.

Design priorities

Before discussing the technology, be sure that you have studied the needs that your website meets. In our case, we wanted to address three items as priorities:

• Posting jobs and resumes
• Updating meeting and event information
• Sharing contact information for the officers

We looked at our logs and statistics for the web site (knowing full well that web stats are an inexact science) and backed up our priorities with statistics analysis. The only additional detail we found was that site visitors read a salary survey report and a listing of technical publications agencies quite often so we knew those had to be included going forward. We made our top priority providing continually updating information for job seekers.

Budgeting for website needs

We also had our past year’s budgets available and also looked for areas where website features could save money in others’ budgets. An example is the annual local salary survey we conduct, which cost the chapter $120 a year in the past. If a web-based survey could save some money in that area, we wanted to be sure to try to design that into the site. Part of analyzing the budget was looking at the amount of bandwidth necessary to ensure the same level of service to the web site visitors.

Researching CMS technology

Next I sat down and looked through more than a dozen local STC community sites to look for trends and observe designs that I liked and found useful.

Based on reading http://stcforum.org/viewtopic.php?id=117 and http://stcforum.org/viewtopic.php?id=785 plus doing some investigation of other chapter’s websites on my own, I gathered that other chapters have used these CMSes.

• North Carolina STC at http://www.stc-carolina.org uses Tiki Wiki from http://tikiwiki.org/
• Indiana STC at http://www.stc-indiana.org/ uses Expression Engine from http://www.pmachine.com/
• Iowa STC at http://stc-desmoines.org uses Plone from http://www.plone.org
• STC France at http://www.stcfrance.org/ uses Drupal from http://www.drupal.org

I noticed that many local communities have started using WordPress from http://wordpress.org for their website. While WordPress is typically associated with blogging software, it is also a decent CMS. Posts are typically displayed in journal fashion with the time/date stamp dictating the display, but WordPress also has page management and plug-ins that let you use it in a CMS manner. The WordPress sites that caught my eye are:

• Hyperviews Online (this site)
• http://www.stc-suncoast.org/
• http://www.stcalaska.org/

Having used WordPress for my blog at www.justwriteclick.com and thinking it would work well for multiple contributors on a geographic community web site such as STC Austin, I decided to focus my attention on the how and why of a WordPress implementation. My basic knowledge of WordPress was that there’s a wordpress.org, where you download and install your own installation of WordPress and any plugins you need, and there’s wordpress.com, where you can set up a blog quickly but you cannot install plugins.

Surveying web masters who use WordPress

Armed with my tiny bit of knowledge about WordPress (the .com variety, not .org), I emailed the web masters for the WordPress sites and asked them the following questions:

1. Did you set it up as a group blog so that officers can write and publish their own pages?
2. Is it a hassle to manage permissions for users?
3. Do you need certain WordPress plugins (thereby not allowing us to use hosted WordPress at wordpress.com)
4. What do you accomplish with the plugins?
5. What’s the most difficult thing to accomplish with Wordpress for your current website goals?
6. What areas or functionality do you feel are lacking?
7. How much involvement do you have with multiple content editors?
8. How difficult was it to train others to use WordPress?
9. Can you outline the general design you took when starting out with WordPress? What have you added on later?
10. What other CMSes were on your radar?

Here is a summary of the resulting information gathered from this informal survey.

Group blogging and managing permissions for users

Everyone had set up their WordPress site as a group blog, and said that permissions are quite easy with WordPress. People described two basic approaches. One is to have one or two editors who are the only ones given permission to publish content. The second approach is to give everyone that contributes content the ability to publish that content. One downside to the first approach that a site administrator noted is the lack of an email notification so that contributions being saved would automatically trigger an email notification to the person with publishing permissions. There’s a WordPress plugin for that, but in their particular case, it would have required an update of the underlying WordPress software to use a compatible plug-in.

To others, the difficulty in the second approach (allowing everyone to publish) mostly centers on getting enthusiastic and consistent contributors.

WordPress plugins

Tom Johnson gave a very helpful list of WordPress plugins that he uses for the http://www.stc-suncoast.org/ site.

Examples of uses for WordPress plugins are tasks like spam control, displaying event calendars, and RSS feed management. I’ve included links to each of the plugins’ sites for easier viewing and downloading.

Spam control: Bad Behavior, Akismet, and Spam Karma (”Activate all 3 and spam disappears,” says Tom.)

Show inbound links to your web site: Kramer

Protect email addresses from spam: Obfuscate Email

Show most popular posts: Popularity Contest

Show related posts: Related Posts

Ease of configuring sidebars: Samarsin PHP widget

Show people who have commented the most: Show top commentators

Show advanced toolbar for editing content: Visualize Advanced Features,

RSS feed management: Subscribe to comments

Basic and overall site administration: WordPress database backup, All-in-one SEO pack

Multimedia: Podpress, Video plugin

Events and calendars: Event calendar and widget, Evermore

Content management: List subpages, Table of contents generator, and WP-table

For a list of all the Wordpress plugins, go to: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/.

What was most difficult to accomplish with WordPress?

Even backup is easy with WordPress, so most major administrative tasks are not difficult. Listservs are typically separate from the web site, so the disconnect between an email-based system and an RSS or blog-notification system is apparent, and you do not know which one ensures that everyone in the chapter gets certain postings or notifications. So it is not easy to push notifications using WordPress alone.

Functions that WordPress lacks and managing multiple contributors

Some web masters found that member participation is the most difficult to accomplish but know that is not related to the Wordpress tool. However, participation is critical to the success of a content management system if you want the content to be contributed by everyone. So your community culture is a factor in setting up a CMS-based web site if you want other officers or members to contribute content.

Training others to use WordPress

No training was needed for the editor and content addition tools, other than ensuring that authors do not paste in existing “bad” HTML code such as that generated by Word. A training session sounded like a good idea although no one had held one yet.

For the SunCoast community, job opportunities are the most frequently posted items, and the employment manager posts those, so it was important to insure that the other officers are ready and willing to use WordPress to post new opportunities.

General website design tips

Ann Wiley had the good advice to “Use the default, because it’s closest to the Xerox Publishing Standards and the least work to use for multiple sites. When designing your STC community website, include the required and recommended items in the STC Newsletter Competition guidelines.” You could use those guidelines for your outline if you were stumped for other ideas.

CMS choices besides WordPress

As the list above shows, many other STC communities are using other CMSes such as Drupal, Plone, Tiki Wiki, Expression Engine, and Joomla. Destry Wion, a web designer at http://wion.com, wrote about selecting an open source CMS at Hyperviews Online that also serves as a good reference.

Merging design and content management to meet your goals

By keeping your members goals in mind, you can ensure that your website has current updated content that is managed and backed up and contributed by many instead of a few using WordPress or another content management system. While we eventually selected Joomla as our CMS for our new (unfinished) site at www.stc-austin.org, the research I did for WordPress implementations should be helpful to anyone beginning to consider using a CMS for maintaining their STC community website.

A DITA collaboration solution is available for SharePoint 2007 Server, DITA Exchange. The DITA Exchange Product Fact Sheet is available: http://194.192.14.222/_layouts/dx/DxPublic/dx/DxFactSheet-2007-04.pdf

UC Davis has a web content management initiative, and did a survey on CMS use in universities. The project web site is at http://cms.ucdavis.edu/index.html

The University Web Developers mailing list (http://www.usask.ca/web_project/uwebd/) is reported to have discussions on use of content management systems.

Information Architecture Institute. Semantic Web Strategies Conference. San Jose, CA. September 30 - October 2, 2007. http://iainstitute.org/calendar/000644.php

16th Annual WritersUA Conference for Software User Assistance. Portland, OR. March 16 - 19. 2008. http://www.writersua.com/ohc07/index.html

Strategy A Consulting Group. Content Convergence and Integration Conference. Vancouver, BC, Wednesday 12 March — Friday 14 March 2008.
http://convergence.confabb.com/conferences/cci2008/details

Online Help Conference Europe 2007. 19 - 21 September 2007, Vilnius, Lithuania. http://www.uaconference.eu

Editor: Doug Tudhope (dstudhope@glam.ac.uk) Associate Editor: Daniel Cunliffe (djcunlif@glam.ac.uk) Faculty of Advanced Technology, University of Glamorgan, UK

Submission deadline: January 16, 2008 Acceptance notification: February 27, 2008 Final manuscripts due: April 9, 2008

Submissions may take the form of research papers or shorter technical notes and should be sent by email to the editors, preferably in pdf format. Questions and enquiries are welcome.

NRHM covers hypermedia, hypertext, interactive multimedia and related technologies. The journal invites papers on the following topics and related issues:

• Conceptual basis of hypertext systems cognitive aspects design strategies
• Intelligent and adaptive hypermedia knowledge representation knowledge organisation systems and services the semantic web
• Multimedia issues time and synchronisation; link dynamics audio/image/video processing and compression content-based retrieval
• Interaction navigation and browsing; search systems; studies of information seeking and navigation behaviour; testing and evaluation user interfaces; multi-modal interaction
• Tools for hypermedia (automatic) authoring systems
• Applications in business, commerce, digital libraries, e-learning, information management, the professions, publishing, and public administration, and so on

The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia (NRHM) is published by Taylor & Francis and appears in both print and digital formats. For more details and topics, see the journal website: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/13614568.asp

Web Content Management - CM Pros Fall 2007 Summit. November 26, 2007, Boston, MA. http://www.cmprosevents.org

The focus is Web Content Management Technologies and Their Impact on the Way We Work. The Fall 2007 CM Pros Summit, takes place November 26, 2007 (in conjunction with the 4th Annual Gilbane Conference on Content Technologies Boston) at the Westin Copley Place. Early bird registrants save $100 on registration by September 30, 2007.

Web content management software has made it possible for organizations to increase workplace efficiency through collaboration, eliminate unnecessary waste through automation, lower cost of production through process improvements and workflow routing, and, perhaps most importantly, make possible the delivery of relevant content with pinpoint accuracy, increasingly, on demand. When localization and translation enter the equation, these benefits grow exponentially.

Where can organizations find the knowledge needed to take advantage of these powerful, paradigm-shifting technologies? The CM Pros Fall 2007 Summit is an excellent starting place. (more…)

Scott Jehl (http://www.scottjehl.com) has posted a free web-based tool for creating sitemaps, http://writemaps.com/  ”to provide a fast, fun, and easy way to plan your websites.”

If you’re in need of comprehensive information about today’s content management systems, try these sources:

http://www.cmswatch.com/ (offering a report comparing nearly 30 systems, both open source and commercial enterprise systems)

http://www.opensourcecms.com/ (listing available systems)

http://www.cmsmatrix.org/matrix (providing comparisons)

Enterprise systems currently in use include:

• Vignette - V7 Content Management
• Documentum (EMC) and Documentum Web Publisher
• IBM - Workplace WCM
• RedDot (Open Text)  and RedDot CMS
• Interwoven - TeamSite
• Oracle - Stellent Web Content Management