Tanya has posted a rather ingenious solution for creating a faceted classification system for posts in MovableType. This gets around the built-in functionality of MT that only allows one level of categories.
I love this closing line from her entry:
This is additional evidence to back up my observation that most problems in life can be solved with the creative use of regular expressions.
I just bought an ASP.NET control from 360 IMPACT for some work we are doing. Anthony deserves big kudos from his company for the excellent support he gave me as I tried out the demo as well as going the extra mile to configure the license keys for our specific environment. Truly excellent customer service is pretty hard to find these days. Thanks Anthony!
The control should be a nice time saver as we create a bunch of e-mail forms in ASP.NET.
Nathan Ashby-Kuhlman has layed out his best practices for URL construction.
- URLs should be human-readable.
- URLs should be short.
- URLs should be hierarchical.
- URLs should be permanent.
All good ideas. Here are some pointers to other discussions about URLs I posted a while back.
(Found via Simon Willison.)
David Crow has posted the results of a content management system selection process he has completed for a client, including a full list of the systems they evaluated.
Jeff Freund has written an excellent article posted on CMSWatch that discusses the problems you may encounter in a content management system as the amount of content it stores grows. A quote:
The easiest way to understand interface scalability is to think through a simple question about your content management system: what happens to my job and the job of the editors and authors when the amount of content in the system increases two-fold? How about five-fold, or ten-fold, or fifty-fold? It?s a question not many think to ask before making a CMS purchase, but it?s a revealing one. Many interfaces work very well with small amounts of content, but begin to break down when the amount of content in the system increases.
The concept of interface scalability is especially critical in content management systems where web browser-based screens predominate.
…
Interface bottlenecks typically result in creeping inefficiencies in editorial processes. Maybe it takes too long to find content because, while the system response time is fine, there?s simply too much stuff to wade through. Perhaps some operations you would like to make in bulk can only be conducted one at a time. Or maybe there isn?t an easy way to see who is working on what, so sorting out the week?s responsibilities takes editors several rounds of the kind of off-system emails and face-to-face meetings that the CMS was meant to obviate in the first place.
Our team at work has encountered many of these problems in working with CMS’s. The biggest challenge I have encountered around scale is not being able to modify the properties of an arbitrarily selected group of pages and/or content. While it sounds like an obvious function it is easy to miss it unless you’ve had some experience and/or good advice.
When you are evaluating the functions of a CMS, ask yourself how easy it would be to do the same type of operation to 1000 pages. What looks like a great interface for a single page may be unworkable for a 1000.
Ultimately, I think that systems that take have a content repository model (content can be disassociated from a page but still exist in the repository) will scale better than those that use a page-centric model (where content is tied to the page in which it is created on the site). In my experiece, page-centric system have a built in bias of editing single pages which leads to rather anemic features for multi-page operations.
Jesse James Garrett has posted an article laying out what he views as the nine major competencies for a web team: The Nine Pillars of Successful Web Teams.
This seems like an accurate model to me and maps pretty well to my own experience building a web team. If you are deficient in any one of the areas your overall effort will suffer quite a bit.
(Article spotted via James Robertson.)
This has been reported all over the place but for posterity here it is:
It has been learned through public and private sources that AOL has cut or will cut the remaining team working on Mozilla in a mass firing and are dismantling what was left of Netscape (they’ve even pulled the logos off the buildings). Some will remain working on Mozilla during the transition, and will move to other jobs within AOL.
The good news, however, is that the Mozilla Foundation has been set-up to foster continued development on the open source Mozilla (aka Firebird) browser. If promised money comes through it should have a nice endowment from the get-go.
Tony Byrne of CMSWatch will be speaking about current trends in XML use in web content management this Wednesday at the July Washington DC XML/SGML User Group meeting . You have to register in advance in order to attend (free but required for security reasons).
I’m trying out the Zempt desk-top authoring tool for MT. Pretty slick. In fact, I’m posting this message with it.
I’m wondering if it will work on a PocketPC (which I’m using as a PDA these days)? Have to look into that.
James Robertson has published an article that provides a concise and basic introduction to content management systems. This is a great piece to refer to management and others who you need to get up to speed on what exactly a CMS is and the general business problems to which it can be applied.
A content management system (CMS) is critical to the success of almost every website and intranet, and yet many organisations are not familiar with this technology.
So, while we have written many articles on a range of specific CMS issues and strategies, we now take a step back to answer the question: what is a content management system?
In this article we will focus on web content management, and will only touch upon broader content issues at the end of the document.
C. David Gammel, CAE 