Article
Content management at the UW Arboretum (it’s about people)
A few weeks ago, I posted about a brand new web site for the UW-Madison Arboretum. This was ZEMU’s biggest project to date, and as such, reflected a lot of the lessons I’ve learned in the last couple of years.
Here’s the big one: Content matters a lot. And a good plan for managing content matters even more.
Much of the web community now realizes the role people play in content management. (Hint: They play the big one.) Any content management technology needs to, first and foremost, support the people producing the content and support a realistic process for doing so.
Here’s a little summary of the people and technology behind the content management process at the UW Arboretum.
Specific tools for specific needs
We originally planned to use a heavily hacked installation of MovableType as a content management system (CMS), but changed course upon discovering that MT was both more than we needed and less than we needed, just in different places.
For static pages, it was too much; and for the photo galleries and events calendar, it didn’t offer enough.
So we created a logical split between the parts of the site that wouldn’t change often — “about,” “visitor’s guide,” “contact us,” etc — and the parts that would. We built a custom CMS for the news, photos and events sections of the site, but that’s it. We didn’t try to reinvent the wheel by creating a monstrosity that would allow web-based editing of every page on the site.
Instead, we created the simplest possible solution.
Smart templates
Noel Jackson did most of the front-end coding, and he was smart enough to break down each page into little pieces and create PHP templates that exposed only the bare content. Here’s an abbreviated example:
<?php
include $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/common/header.php'; ?>
<title>UW-Madison Arboretum - History</title>
<?php
include $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/common/middle.php'; ?>
<?php start_sidebar() ?>
<h2>ABOUT THE ARBORETUM</h2>
<p>Learn about our restored ecological communities,
rich history, and visitor opportunities.</p>
<p class="hangingLink">
<a href="/about">About the Arboretum</a></p>
<?php end_sidebar() ?>
<h2>Arboretum History</h2>
<p>Though they may not have anticipated it at the time,
the University of Wisconsin's Arboretum committee's
foresight resulted in the Arboretum's ongoing status
as a pioneer in the restoration and management of
ecological communities. In focusing on the re-
establishment of historic landscapes, particularly
those that predated large-scale human settlement, they
introduced a whole new concept in ecology: ecological
restoration -- the process of returning an ecosystem
or piece of landscape to a previous, usually more
natural, condition.</p>
<?php
include $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/common/footer.php'; ?>
The beauty in this template is that the content is right there for all to see. With a few minutes of guidance, anyone can open this file in a text editor and understand what’s going on.
And since we knew the static pages would be edited by one person only, we didn’t have to worry about version control, training a team of editors, developing and supporting (more) content management software, or managing access to the content.
Instead, Pat Brown (at the Arboretum) installed an FTP client and a text editor on her computer, and got to work.
A custom application for editing dynamic content
It was clear that some parts of the web site — news, events and photos — could benefit from a database-driven application for managing the content. So we built one.
Here we did a couple of things that turned out to be really good for the content management process:
- We designed most of the CMS after the rest of the site had been built. This spared us the pain of trying to “meet in the middle,” and ensured that we could tailor the application specifically to the needs of the site and the people using it.
- Taylor Hughes, my own personal genius, created an astonishingly flexible and well-designed data model for the application. Making changes, adding fields, and all sorts of other modifications were easy-peasy right up until we were “finished.” (And these changes will always be easy to make in the future.)
Unlike with the page templates, we knew that the database-driven content would be edited by multiple people at different times. We found ourselves staring Scope Creep (that old nemesis) right in the face — should we add user account management? Version control? Different editing and publishing privileges for different people?
No. We shouldn’t. And we didn’t.
Ultimately, managing content is a question of people working together. As such, it’s always better to solve a content management problem with people than with technology. Sure, we could’ve incorporated piles of features to make sure no one stepped on anyone’s toes, to make sure no one made edits they weren’t allowed to make, and to make sure everyone could see the changes everyone else made.
But we realized that since only 3-4 people would ever be editing the site, we could leave these features out of the app — to the benefit of everyone involved — and ask the content contributors to manage the content amongst themselves.
It’s a people solution to a people problem. And it really works.