Forum OpenACS Q&A: Copenhagen - CMS & CR meeting

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1: Copenhagen - CMS & CR meeting
Posted by Bruno Mattarollo on 04/11/03 11:24 AM

These are my notes from the session about CR/CMS

We had a very busy meeting here in Copenhagen about the CR and the CMS, more than 20 participants.

Don, Peter, Timo and Dirk talked about the need to have a centralized table that would store the "description" of objects to allow a consistent way to have "named objects". There is an already quite elaborated and long thread in the forums (note that I searched for this so any of the participants might correct this link if it's wrong).

There was agreement on the need of having this functionality.

There also were comments about the inadequate documentation and API of the CR that should be ehanced and cleaned up.

A person from Cambridge University mentionned a plug-in from Mozilla that allows WYSIWYG edition of content that would then be fed back into a textarea form. You can find more information about this at Mozdev.org.

There is a need for a simple module to install and use that would allow "out of box" publishing, something simple that would target the masses instead of just the hard-core-geeks

Malte also mentionned a development that his company has been doing for AIESEC that could be added to the form builder or as an enhancement to ETP.

For other participants of this meeting: please feel free to add more notes/comments/ideas/things that I might have missed.

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2: Re: Copenhagen - CMS & CR meeting (response to 1)
Posted by Gabriel Ricard on 04/12/03 01:42 AM
You don't really even have to use a plugin just to have a WYSIWYG text area in a page. InteractiveTools has a free product called htmlArea that provides a WYSIWYG text area editor in both IE and Mozilla (1.3 or greater). It's still in beta, but it does work in Moz 1.3.

http://www.interactivetools.com/products/htmlarea/

This is the kind of thing you wish would just work in every browser out there, but IE is available on every Windows computer out there (sadly this is a majority), and Mozilla runs on damn near everything else.

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3: Re: Copenhagen - CMS & CR meeting (response to 1)
Posted by Brian Fenton on 04/14/03 11:34 AM
Kevin Crosbie has already written and submitted a package that has a WYSIWYG editor. It also allows you to create RTF files from the text. It's at https://openacs.org/storage/download/template-letter-1.0.apm?version_id=71419
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4: Re: Copenhagen - CMS & CR meeting (response to 3)
Posted by Brian Fenton on 04/14/03 11:36 AM
Oh yeah, Kevin has described on this forum posting: https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=71372
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5: Re: Copenhagen - CMS & CR meeting (response to 1)
Posted by Hazi Gharagozlou on 04/14/03 08:05 PM
From the number of people present we can safely assume that CMS is critical to many OpenACS projects. I came away from this gathering with the following impressions:

  • Whoever needed CMS, they have built their system apart from OpenACS CMS.

  • Very few people knew how the other Open source CMS functioned.

  • Very few people have played with the current CMS module. Some felt that it did not work, Jeff Davies contends the problem lies with the UI. The underlying technology (data model and Oracle packages) are well thought out and function correctly.

  • No consensus on the important components of CMS. Do we need an asset management system? Do we need a product to allow users to manage templates (i.e. DreamWeaver)?

  • The new workflow breaks CMS. Not very promising.

I think as a community we need to define a framework (perhaps a new requirement). Organizations that have build a CMS should share their experiences (why did they not use the CR)

Ronald Haynes suggested that we should download some of the packages available on the net and analyse their advantages and disadvantages.

Jeff Davies's believes we should incrementally build the modules. If we have a CMS product, lets make sure that it works (or used) properly. Streamline the UI. Later in the day Jeff also mentioned that about 3 weeks are required to redo the UI.

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6: Re: Copenhagen - CMS & CR meeting (response to 1)
Posted by Dave Bauer on 04/16/03 06:32 PM
I agree with Jeff. Let's get some basic functions working, and expand on that. And make sure we get the UI right this time.

I would like to see as much as possible, packages that implement the various features that can be plugged together to build a custom CMS.

Some interesting developments are happening across open source CMS products. See http://www.oscom.org. A conference is coming up at the end of May that should be very interesting.

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7: Re: Copenhagen - CMS & CR meeting (response to 6)
Posted by Hazi Gharagozlou on 04/16/03 08:18 PM
Next week I am going to download couple of the products listed in Oscom to get a feel of other UIs. What is clear that we don't have anything decent to show in Cambridge, MA. in May. May be we should start thinking of being present at a future conference.

How about starting a thread at CMS forum discussing the UI