Forum OpenACS Q&A: what are best practices for content, system management

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1: what are best practices for content, system management
Posted by bill kellerman on 09/19/03 11:38 PM
Trying to wrap my head around the openacs and I have some questions...

Is there a standard method of content management?  I'm confused whether the file manager, content manager, and edit this page packages should be used.

I work in a library.  One of the requirements I have is to give the staff the ability to easily edit and add pages to the site.  Our intranet is fairly loose, so I suppose I could use the static pages package with searching on top.

Our public site is much more rigid and structured, and will require not only display templating but methods for resource management (external and internal links, etc.)  ...so static pages won't work for this.

Is there an openacs.org-recommended method? What is the standard, and in what direction is it going for the future?  Are there any other libraries using the system that I can consult with?

Also, what are standards for moving site data between installations?  I have a development site on my laptop, another on a separate development server, and future production servers.  If I am changing and creating packages, adding subsites, data, that sort of thing, what is the best way to keep the openacs syncronized?

How can I tell the difference between an "openacs.org certified package", and those that are just available work in progress add-ons?

Thanks for the information.  Sorry to blast too many questions at once.

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2: Re: what are best practices for content, system management (response to 1)
Posted by Dave Bauer on 09/20/03 04:33 AM
Derek,

We are trying to answer these questions ourselves.

Right now, the easiest packages for content creation are edit-this-page or lars-blogger. Both have search indexing for postgresql built in if you install OpenFTS search.

You could build a system out of the existing parts, but there isn't any existing package that offers the features you are looking for. I assume you want to be able to handle such content as external links, images, documents in binary formats (pdf doc etc). I think the best way to manage those currently is probably file-storage.

I am thinking about how I might offer image storage for edit-this-page, and that might be the way to go.

As for "official" openacs packages, that is still being determined, have a look at https://openacs.org/projects/openacs/5.0/package_inventory

Feel free to ask more questions as you have them. You also might want to visit the irc channel #openacs on irc.freenode.net. See https://openacs.org/irc/ for information.

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3: Re: what are best practices for content, system management (response to 2)
Posted by bill kellerman on 09/21/03 12:56 PM
Thanks for the reply.

I'll run through what is available and see if maybe a combination would be appropriate.

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4: Re: what are best practices for content, system management (response to 2)
Posted by russ m on 09/22/03 02:30 AM

Isn't this the sort of thing that the CMS was built to handle?

What's the state of the CMS at the moment? It's broken on -HEAD as of a couple of days ago, and I'm starting to submit patches for the most basic fixes (noquote stuff, PG arg casts), but I've started to hit some spots where fixes aren't quite so obvious to my non-CMS/CR-familiar eye.

Has there been any movement on the CMS rewrite in the last couple of months?