Tuesday 15 September 2009

University CMS away day

We had an away day (at home!) on the 11th September to discuss the next version of the CMS.
It is documented in detail on ILRT pypi.
This involved analysing a survey to users of the system and getting input from other parts of the University (mainly IS) about what we should do next time.
The main conclusions seemed to be:

  1. We had assumed we would stick with Plone, but this may need revisiting since centrally Java based or commercial solutions were mooted. Plone was chosen last time by central IS based on its use of zope. Now that linkage is lessening and zope is struggling as a platform amongst all the newer python ones. However the added costs of anything else may be too much.

  2. Simplicity should be key - use of a CMS has seen no significant increase in web editors because of complexity - we need to radically simplify editing for occasional users

  3. On the other hand all existing features must be retained - hence regular users need to be able to turn on more complex editing features

  4. The CMS needs a deployment framework to push content, chrome and system info to other systems

  5. Non CMS tasks such as database applications should be move outside of Plone (but be integrated)