Forum OpenACS CMS: Some examples of specific content management screens

Hi all

Greenpeace built an OpenACS based CMS. Because the code was far from standard or elegant, we probably won't release it for a while. However, there are some things we can share...

I've uploaded a few of the screens our people use internally when publishing content to the web. Although it's very non profit specific, it might trigger some ideas.

I think what we'd do is define a content type, like a press release. The fields you see in the examples I have uploaded, I think they would be attributes of the content type.

Some of the fields you see are not attributes but our rough way of doing categories. Whenever we put any piece of content into the system we have to associate it to a campaign. (Hence all the check boxes at the top of each form). Please note - the source code for these forms is probably horrible - I'm hoping the really interesting stuff is how the content is broken down.

To see the screens, please goto the storage area of OpenACS, https://openacs.org/storage/ and goto the CMS related folder. In there you should find about 5 screens specifically devoted to the content attributes of some of our typical content types.

Yeah I heard about that approach. We didn't like it because we often operate in the field - we've been known to climb to the top of smoke stacks, lock on, and stay there with our laptops till they come and cut us off.

When you have multiple pages and a bad connection from the field it increases the chance that you lose the connection between one page and the next.

Also, we talked to out press officers here, and they are quite used to the idea of putting all the information into one long form. They wanted to be able to look over an entire story, in one glance, before publishing it. So we went with one long form.