Using a Content Management System (CMS) for your STC community web site
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:
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Posting jobs and resumes
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Updating meeting and event information
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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.
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North Carolina STC at http://www.stc-carolina.org uses Tiki Wiki from http://tikiwiki.org/
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Indiana STC at http://www.stc-indiana.org/ uses Expression Engine from http://www.pmachine.com/
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Iowa STC at http://stc-desmoines.org uses Plone from http://www.plone.org
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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:
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:
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Did you set it up as a group blog so that officers can write and publish their own pages?
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Is it a hassle to manage permissions for users?
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Do you need certain WordPress plugins (thereby not allowing us to use hosted WordPress at wordpress.com)
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What do you accomplish with the plugins?
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What’s the most difficult thing to accomplish with Wordpress for your current website goals?
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What areas or functionality do you feel are lacking?
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How much involvement do you have with multiple content editors?
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How difficult was it to train others to use WordPress?
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Can you outline the general design you took when starting out with WordPress? What have you added on later?
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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.