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

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.

Whether it’s accurate to say that just a few people write Wikipedia, or a large number of people do, depends on the kind of analysis that’s done: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia

By the STC Online SIG. Originally published February 2006. Revised September 2006.

Based on input from Destry Wion, member, Online SIG web team

There are many open source systems that provide functionality that a dynamic site for an STC SIG might need. To select a system, match the objectives and requirements for the dynamic SIG site to each candidate open source system, and choose a system that supports the maximum number of site objectives and requirements without customization.

The major activities in selecting an open source system are described here. (more…)

by Marcia Poulsen, member, CNY chapter and Online SIG

Should writers use gerunds in topic titles, for example, “Balancing the Checkbook”?

There’s been some excellent, thought-provoking discussion on STC’s Online SIG list on this question recently. It’s a question that I’ve wrestled with for a while, not just for online Help but for topic-based writing in any medium. I’ve read everything I could get my hands on about topic-based (modular) writing, I’ve studied examples of online Help, and I’ve debated this question with anyone who’s interested.

Here’s what I’ve found. (more…)

In the August 2006 issue of EContent, Bob Doyle’s article “Community Portals and Plaforms” examines how websites support collaboration in virtual communities through multiple tools integrated by web services. (more…)

by Dirk Manuel, Member Belgium chapter and ID-IA SIG with an introduction by Walt Jones, Senior Member, Online SIG

This article is based on a post by Dirk Manuel on May 11, 2006 on the ID-IA SIG email list, and appears by Dirk’s permission. The introduction was posted on the Online SIG list, and appears by Walt’s permission. These posts responded to a question about a tool called OnDemand Personal Navigator.

Introduction

Walt Jones begins:
OnDemand Personal Navigator (ODPN) from Global Knowledge is primarily a software simulation tool that also allows export of various forms of printable documents. Macromedia Captivate and Authorware provide smoother simulations, but ODPN provides more control over recording. Editing is relatively easy, though not as advanced as Captivate. (more…)

This article is reprinted from Ragged Left, newsletter of the Berkeley chapter STC, September/October 2005. It is the review of the chapter’s August 2005 meeting by Ron Sands.

At the August 2005 Berkeley chapter meeting, Dana Chisnell of UsabilityWorks gave an interactive presentation on evaluation of usability using heuristics and personas. The presentation summarized the findings of two research papers she co-wrote with Janice (Ginny) Redish of Redish & Associates, Inc. Their research was commissioned by the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP). All quotations in this article are from the paper “Designing Web Sites for Older Adults: Expert Review of Usability for Older Adults at 50 Web Sites,” which is available for download at the AARP web site. (more…)

An RSS reader renders an XML file posted on the web by a content owner. By posting this XML file, the content owner syndicates the content via RSS, Really Simple Syndication.

This article presents simple steps to download and set up an RSS reader. Katherine Hinchey, a Senior Member in the Online SIG, provided much of the information here. (more…)

The MSHelpWiki has a list of currently available Help authoring systems.

Char James-Tanny published an updated “Help Authoring Tools Comparison Matrix” in February 2006.

Key facts about commonly used tools follow. (more…)

The Online SIG has compiled fact sheets on Online Help, with significant input from Online Help Lead Char-James Tanny and SIG founder Scott DeLoach. This fact sheet has basic information on formats, for people who are new to Online Help or a particular format, or do not use a particular Help format very often. There are three primary Help formats. (more…)