Topic: CMS

Drupal.org redesign – An Experiment in Design by Community

Sholom Sandalow, Friday, January 9, 2009 @ 12:14 pm

Drupal, the popular open source Web Content Management System, has got a massive and passionate community of developers, designers and webmasters.   Drupal.org, their official website was faltering under the weight of this growing community of diverse users, so this past summer the powers that be at Drupal  decided to hire an outside agency to do a complete redesign of the site.  The firm they hired decided to take a "design by community" approach to the project.  They wanted to get as many Drupal users as they could to participate in the redesign.  So, through a number of collaboration mechanisms--setting up a Twitter account to follow mentions of Drupal, opening a Flickr account where the community could post pictures, and actively engaging the existing Drupal forums--they opened the design process up so that anyone in the Drupal community could share in the process.

Conventional wisdom says that design doesn't work as a democracy.  It takes the genius and inspiration of a small team or one person to understand what the customer needs, and design the right solution.  As Henry Ford said it best, "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse."  So I'm not surprised that according to Mark Boulton, the lead Designer on the project, many people though that this type of open process would fall flat on it's face.  I'm not convinced that it won't, but from what I've seen, the site is looking good.

It's still in prototype phase, so it remains to be seen if the redesign, once implemented, will be a success.  but you can get a look at the evolution of the design here, and of course follow the links to the discussions.  It's a fascinating look at one designers experiment in design by community.

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User Experience Design

A New Workflow for Web Designers

Sholom Sandalow, Tuesday, July 1, 2008 @ 5:43 pm

It was Tim Berners Lee's original vision of the web that online documents be both readable and writable. He notes in his book "Weaving the Web" that that he was disappointed with the way the browser was initially developed as a read only technology, making it expensive and onerous for the asses to publish online content, and essentially creating a top down system, with lots and lots of readers but few writers.

Only recently has the technology that allows anyone to easily publish and edit online documents, in the form of Wiki's and Blogs, been developed. These tools have become so popular, so ubiquitous precisely because they cater to what users really want, fulfilling the potential that the web's founding father had envisioned for it almost 20 years ago.
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Software Development

More CMS and Ajax – What About CDS?

Dietrich Kappe, Wednesday, September 27, 2006 @ 12:17 pm

We talked about CMS and Ajax back in June, so I thought it was about time to see what had transpired in the world of CMS. Back then, it seemed that the CMS side (Content Management, i.e. the part your editors and authors use) had the most immediate promise for using Ajax, but that the CDS side (Content Display, i.e. the part that the actual readers see) was a different matter, with lots of headaches for managing scripts, style sheets and interactions. In essence, the domain model for most of these CMS's out there does not account for the fine-grained interactions of Ajax on the CDS side.

So, what are some of the more noteworthy developments for CMS and Ajax? All of the commercial vendors I've checked with, Interwoven, etc., have either added or are planning to add Ajax to their CMS apps, but not CDS so far. Beyond that, here are some highlights:

1. MODx, a CMS and PHP application framework has been getting lots of press. The actual "Ajaxiness" of the app seems a little limited. And by their own admission, their focus is to introduce more of it into the CMS side, i.e. the "Manager" rather than the CDS. It does have "live search" and some Ajax powered voting, however.
   
   

   MODx is the first free PHP CMS to offer an API that fully supports Web 2.0 Ajax technology thanks to script.aculo.us. Expect to see this grow more and more into our manager over time, but you can make use of it today in your own custom applications including live search, web effects, Ajax communications and more.

2. Micro CMS v.3.5 is a commercial CMS that also touts it's Ajax capabilities, again in the CMS side.
3. Skeletonz is another CMS where the manager interface features AJAX and the CDS does not. This one is written in Python.
4. MuraveyWeb, a Ruby on Rails CMS, seems to have closed up shop. The original files are still available on RubyForge.
5. MooFlex CMS Demo - just a demo at this point. Not much more info than the Ajaxian article. I'd expect a little more Ajax in the actual demo from the Mad4Milk crowd.
6. The Drupal CMS project has been busy adding Ajax to its CMS and CDS according to this levelheaded Ajax manifesto. They've settled on JQuery for their core Ajax library. They seem to be the most aggresive in adding real Ajax to the CDS, such as a real-time chat room. While we're on the topic of JQuery, check out the maiden issue of JQuery Magazine.
7. Ajax Fly is a add in to the Mambo/Joomla Open Source CMS.

So far, I like the looks of Drupal and its Ajax CDS integration. Overall, people seem to be doing rather than thinking. I expect some folks are in stage two of Joe Walker's 4 stages of Ajax Adoption -- progressive enhancement -- while others are already in state three -- the second site. Stay tuned for more on what is likely to be a fast changing Ajax CDS landscape.

Technorati : ajax, cms

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Software Development

CMS and AJAX

Dietrich Kappe, Wednesday, June 21, 2006 @ 9:00 am

Back in April, CMS Watch published an article entitled Ajax and Your CMS. The article looks at the impact of AJAX on CMS systems from both the content author's and the site visitors perspective. From the author's perspective, the news is all good and pretty conventional as far as AJAX articles go: fewer click, drag-and-drop, faster, more powerful UI. There are a few noteworthy points to the article, however. For one, content management with AJAX enabled, single-page sites puts a premium on managing assets:

If you are going to use a heavily-Ajax-driven interface on your websites, then it is worth considering a CMS to manage intra-page snippets and interaction as discrete elements. In practice it could be difficult to manage a rich, interactive site that uses single page interfaces without a CMS, since at this point you are managing content components rather than entire "pages." The whole notion of "pages" tends to dissipate, which would call for a more component-oriented -- rather than page-oriented -- CMS for those looking to manage Ajax-driven websites.

So, if you're publishing content rather than constructing an application, then composing a bunch of widgets together using a CMS sounds plausible. However,

Web CMS tools are notoriously poor at managing stylesheet elements and client-side scripting in particular. The rise of Ajax should prompt some improvements here.

Improve or die, I guess.

The few bad patches for the content author are things that people are already working on: back button, refresh/reload an state, etc. Previewing content from a single page interface is a problem not just restricted to CMS's. You can identify the "states" within the single page interface and preview those, i.e. "show me the state after a restaurant has been picked."

That's It?

The fact that CMS Watch really struggled to find much more to say about AJAX than "will make it easier to use, may make content harder to manage," I think points out that nobody really has a clue about how to effectively use AJAX for content sites. All of the major AJAX enabled sites these days seem to be collaborative filtering excercises like digg and dzone. There must be better ways than this to apply this nifty technology.

I think we can come up with a few ideas. What are some of the content display issues we can tackle with AJAX? Let me give three off the top of my head:

• Screen real estate - we can summarize an article and expand the full test into a new reading context when the user navigates to it. I have a primitive little example here. Just click on one of the text boxes to read the full article in place.
• Breadcrumbs on steroids - this is more about providing a better reading metaphor. We can make the sections of the paper fold and unfold, allow the reader to rapidly navigate through tabs or trees. No more slow postback means we can try more stuff.
• Contextual control - the WSJ already has the capability to right click on a selected word and perform a search. But contextual search, navigation, and other operations are the next step. Imagine an online newspaper where a reader can right click in an article about their neighborhood and get restaurant review listings for nearby establishments. You no longer have to cram every single relevant thing into the sidebars!

The day is still young on CMS and AJAX. Think outside the box and share your own thoughts on what AJAX can do for CMS.

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Software Development