Oct 23, 2008
Your typical editor is conflicted. On the one hand, he likes to have direct control over what articles are promoted on every page of the site. On the other hand, he realizes that he may not have the time to exert this control. When editors have to manually place articles in every promotional list, they risk letting the important pages (home pages and section front pages) get stale as they tend to other things. When they allow the templating logic to automatically select articles to highlight, they get frustrated by the judgement of automated filtering rules ("why is that article promoted more than this more important article?"). They want to be able to override the automated logic when they have the idea that they could do better.
Here is a classic trick to establish compromise between the extremes of manual control and automation. I have implemented this on many different web content management platforms and it should work on yours. I call it "variable control lists." The basic idea is that you allow an editor to select 0-n articles to include in a promotional list that displays n items. The template logic shows the articles that the editor selected and then fills in the rest of the positions with the results of a query. So, if an editor picks 0 articles to spotlight, the template logic selects n. If the editor selects 3, the template logic selects n-3 articles and lists them after the editors picks.
A couple of nuances should be considered. First, you want to make sure that supplemental list does not include any of the same articles that the editor selected. Second, you might want to apply some additional rules like having the template disregard the editor's picks if they are past a certain age. That really depends on the type of site you are running.
Try it out and see how it works for you. I am especially interested in learning of platforms that this would not work on.
Oct 21, 2008
I was just on the Day Software site and noticed that Kevin Cochrane (who had left Interwoven to join Alfresco) joined Day as their Chief Marketing Officer. This seems like a great fit. Kevin can contribute to Day's already very strong commercial open source strategy (Day is a primary contributor to Apache JackRabbit) and will probably help Day build a U.S. presence. Day's focus on web content management is much greater than Alfresco's so Kevin will probably enjoy more influence in the Day culture. The big question is whether Kevin will bring with him some of his other Interwoven/Alfresco team. Day already has a star-studded technology team and a very strong, standards based content repository.
I am looking forward to seeing Kevin's contributions at Day.
Oct 17, 2008
I just read Boris Kraft's post on losing the the Magnolia.info domain. I have had that happen to me (for a personal site) but never with these consequences. If they can't get their domain back, they will move to magnolia-cms.com - which I think is a better domain anyway. A .com or .org is easier to remember (says the guy with a .net domain).
Best of luck to the Magnolia team in getting their website back and a reminder to everyone else that they should stay on top of their domain registration!
Oct 08, 2008
I was just catching up on some of the open source web content management platforms that I track and noticed the new InfoGlue site. Around a year and a half ago I had given up on InfoGlue because so little had happened. Then I saw Dang Huu Cu's cmf2007 presentation on the United Nations Development Programme Vietnam's use of InfoGlue. Still, very little was happening on the project at the time.
While, I wouldn't say that InfoGlue is thriving, There appears to be some life in the project. They put up a new release (2.9.3) in this September and the site looks much better. They will be holding an online conference on Monday October 13th.
Oct 07, 2008
Just had to post this....
Developers In Pain - Funny bloopers R us
Oct 03, 2008
Roy Fielding, creator of REST puts a nice smack down on CMIS's claim of being RESTfull.
When CMIS was first announced, everyone looked at Day Software whose CTO, David Nuescheler, was the main driver behind the Java Content Repository Standard (JSRs 170 and 283). Of course, Day's response was gracious. David write a congratulatory blog post and released this official quote:
"As three of the largest players in the ECM market, IBM, EMC and Microsoft are well qualified to initiate a protocol specification for content management interoperability that is complementary to a programming API like JCR," said David Nuescheler, CTO of Day Software. "Day Software is happy to actively contribute to the specification, which we view as a validation of our standardization and infrastructure efforts over the last three years. CMIS mirrors JSR 170 in that it is platform-agnostic, appealing to a mixture of languages and technologies. We congratulate the group and look very much forward to participating by contributing our JCR and REST knowledge and experience to future versions of the specification. We welcome CMIS as a high-level content protocol that transcends any one programming language, and see it as a win for the entire industry."
Roy, whose role at Day is Chief Scientist, was less constrained by politeness. Not only does he take CMIS to task for not living up to its RESTful claims, he also calls out the CMIS team for jumping the gun on calling it a "standard."
Ouch!
Oct 03, 2008
A few weeks ago I wrote a post about WebEx alternatives. My conclusion was that there are some good options for sharing a PowerPoint presentation but WebEx was one of the few services that allowed a non-Windows user to share his screen for a software demonstration. WebEx isn't cheap.
I just learned about a service called Yuuguu that seems to work pretty well. Yuuguu is a free service works like an IM client on Windows, Mac, and Linux. All meetings participants need to download and install the client and register for the service. This is not ideal for one off meetings with people you don't usually work with (like a sales demo). Yuuguu is much more appropriate for distributed teams that work regularly together.
The service pays for itself (or at least intends to - I don't know if they are profitable) by recommending a free conference service (British Telecom's Powwow Now) to use during your meeting. If you don't pay extra for your long distance dialing into the free conference number will not cost you anything.
Oct 02, 2008
I am surprised by how few companies employ the little trick of using the WYSIWYG editor in their CMS to semantically tag rich text fields. The general idea is that you overload the WYSIWYG CSS support by using the CSS classes with semantically meaningful names.
Here is an example. Lets say you are publishing a business journal and you write a lot about companies and regulatory agencies. You might have a sentence like
Apparently, following an investigation into the hacking of several dozen customer accounts, the SEC found LPL negligent.
source
The terms "SEC" and "LPL" are italicized in compliance with your style guide. To satisfy the style guide, your reporter probably just highlights the text and clicks the italics button. But, what if your style guide changes to say that company names are bolded and your regulatory agencies are in red text? Using style classes would give you much greater flexibility than "em" and "strong" tags. Most WYSIWYG editors can be configured to have a drop down list of style classes. When a user highlights the text and selects the class, the WYSIWYG editor writes it as a span tag with that class:
<span class="classname">LPL</span>
Now what should you name your classes? Here is the trick. Rather than call them "italics" or "bold" or "red," give them names to indicate the meaning of the text that you are styling: such as "company" and "regulator." In addition to giving more flexibility in styling, you will be able to do some really interesting things with your content. For example:
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With a very simple XSL template you can have your rendering template put a list of mentioned companies and agencies on the page.
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You could extend the logic of your CMS to automatically create metadata about the article to help your search engine figure out that your article is about Apple computers rather than Motts Brand Apple Juice.
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You could have your rendering templates insert the stock symbol of the company or create a link to their ticker page.
The possibilities are really endless when your programming logic has access to the meaning of your content.
Using a WYSIWYG editor to do simple semantic tagging is not the only way to add meaning to your content. You can have your authors write in an XML editor. You can use a text mining engine match words against a centrally managed controlled vocabulary. However, I have found that this approach is the least expensive, most practical way to get started. They want to have their article look nice. This approach captures that intent and, with no additional effort, creates additional value that your author (at first) is less aware of. Once your content starts to have semantic tagging and your technology starts to leverage it, your authors will probably start to see the benefits and really get excited about the possibilities.
Oct 01, 2008
Clients frequently request that I run my calendar on their calendaring systems so that they can schedule me for meetings. I can't really do this because I work for a number of clients and I use my calendar to manage my non-client work and my personal activities. I have a hard enough time managing my time. I don't need the additional burden of replicating the same information in multiple closed systems.
My new work-around is using Spanning Sync (SS) to synchronize my local iCal calendar with a Google Calendar that shows busy times to the general public. So far the solution looks promising but there are some compromises that I have had to make. The biggest one is that I like to have personal and work on different calendars within iCal. SS only does a one-to-one mapping between iCal and Google Calendars so I had to merge my local calendars into one to get a single, public free/busy Google calendar. I recently noticed that iCal allows you to create "groups" of calendars and I was hoping that SS would synchronize a group of calendars as one calendar. Of course, since SS does bi-directional synchronization, this wouldn't really work (how would SS know which iCal calendar to put an event that came from Google Calendar?).
The other compromise is that I had to make my calendar open to the world. I would have preferred to only share it with people I choose. It seems that I can only share with other registered Google users (which is probably everyone but on principle I don't like to force people to register for anything). The public URL is relatively long and obscure but I am sure it is guessable. This is not a huge issue because I am only sharing when I have meetings not what I am doing.
I am wondering what other people are doing when faced with similar requirements.
Sep 30, 2008
I am just starting to get geared up for jboye08 next month. The conference program is still being finalized but you can't go wrong with the great speakers that they have lined up. So far, I am locked in to do a tutorial on open source and to participate in a panel on selecting a CMS.
Note to jboye delegates who are U.S. citizens: You will be out of the country on election day so you should apply for an absentee ballot (unless you plan to vote for the wrong candidate). I just sent off for mine. The site Go Vote Absentee made the process easy.