Content Management Testing 2001

Old Ottawa South

Content Management Testing 2001

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OOS Content Management System Tesing
Report on

Content Structuring Exercise of

OOS Content Management System

- December 6-9, 2001

Summary

As my final "kick at the tires" of the OOS CM system I chose to structure and bring the OSCA Board section of the OOS website fully into the CM system database. I had three purposes here:

1. To be sure that the CM worked well, to report on any deficiencies and recommend changes/additions.
2. To get some experience using a CM system and report on that and
3. To see how complex the work is, while using a CM system.

The OSCA Board content section involved creating about 20 Sidebar Navigation menus and about 80 new pages. The whole job took about 16 hours which could be broken down into:

Sidebar menu creation: 3 hrs
Page creation from existing html without edit (40 pages): 3 hrs
Page creation from existing html with edit (20 pages): 3 hrs
Page creation of html from other docs (mostly rtf)(20 pages): 4 hrs
Rereferencing sidebars and pages: 1 hr
Checking pages and menus, editing & reloading: 2 hr

In general, the CM system worked well. Pages can now be created in the Content Sections (in this case: OSCA Board) and they can be referenced through the new PHP access functions (osca_board.php, community_service.php, history_people.php, local_businesses.php, program_guide.php & the_oscar.php).

Observations & Recommendations

1. This process might be made easier if, while creating a content page, it were possible to designate the "link to" sidebar and add the correct reference into that sidebar page. The process for building a content section is quite complex because of the interaction between content pages and sidebar pages. A content page is linked to through a sidebar page and also is loaded with a, possibly different, sidebar page. The most efficient way is to:
  1. Create "placeholder" sidebar pages, covering the structure completely but not necessarily having any content.
  2. Create the content pages, with the correct "loaded" sidebar "placeholder" page selected
  3. Go back through the sidebar pages, editing them to link to the correct content pages
2. Content creation would have been easier if there were a "preview this page" function available to the CM. In order to see the results of putting up a new page, I needed to have a menu built to access the page and then keep two browsers open; one to do the CM functions and one to view the results. Having to have the menu built in order to see the result was the difficult part.
3. At some point the list of Sidebar Pages will get too long. If someone were to apply the same process to Community Services, there would likely be about 50 more Sidebar Pages. Some way of separating the sidebar pages for each content area should be worked out. The simplest would be to add a field to the table for content section and then only display that section of sidebars when working in that content section.
4. At one point I tried to have a pdf file loaded in the content area. It doesn’t work and it should be made to work.
5. There are some strange things about how content displays. In one case each paragraph in a document was rendered in an increasingly smaller font size.

Description of the process

Sidebar Menus

I chose to create a drop-down menu structure in the sidebars, mainly as an example of how I would like to see the content displayed. This necessitated a certain amount of design before actually creating the menus. I started with two sections under OSCA Board (wrong name, I think) called "OSCA Documents" and "OSCA Board Sub-committees" and four main areas under OSCA Documents:

Bylaws

Board Minutes

AGM Minutes

Special Reports

I ended up replacing "Special Reports" with "President’s Reports".

I created a numbering and naming convention for the sidebars such that all start with "ODoc" and the first number shows the depth of the menu in the hierarchy. I won’t continue describing the system here but rather give an example of the deepest menu structure:

ODoc24 Board Subcommittees

ODoc347 Website Sub-committee

ODoc4472 Website Minutes

There are two reasons for this scheme: all Sidebars are currently in the same list (I think that should be changed) and I wanted some way of telling the relationship between sidebar menus.

Creating this structure took about three hours and included:

Designing the scheme from existing content

Creating the text that would be used in the sidebars (15-20 text files)

Creating the "Side Navigation Pages" in the CM

Going back and correcting the page references after the actual pages had been created

For text creation I use a text editor called NoteTab Pro. This is a multi-document editor that will highlight html and allow mass changes through all loaded documents. I consider this kind of editor essential for working with masses of html files.

Page Creation from existing html without editing

Most of the content for this area was brought over from the old website and has been used in the new one as static html files, linked from lists in other static content pages. Since the website will display plain text or html marked text about 40 of those files went into the database without editing.

Page Creation from existing html with editing

Some of the html files had or css links that were in the way as well as some other anomalies that needed fixing (html generation was via a number of generators including MS Word97, Claris Works 2&3, iRun (an rtf2html utility) & by hand).
Page Creation of html from other docs

In some cases the new documents were in RTF or DOC format. My practice has been to use iRun on simple RTF files and accept that the tags have to be changed. This doesn’t work for documents that have tables or use indents of any kind. IRun ignores the structure and simply creates everything shoved up hard-left.
Since the weekend I have found a very good solution: MSWord 97. If you start with an MS Word 97 DOC or RTF file, it will produce quite nice html when Save As "HTML Document" is used.

Rereferencing sidebars and pages & Checking pages and menus, editing & reloading

I started by creating a few sidebars and then a few pages and then making them work together. Using this hodge-podge method was very inefficient and caused a lot of back and forth between the Section/Osca Board Page creation (and editing, when pages didn’t show the way I wanted) and the Sidebar Navigation Page creation/editing

Eventually I settled down to a production method as described under Recommendation #1. This minimizes the back and forth a bit, although you do want to be sure that your content is showing well before creating a whole lot of (incorrect) pages so it is a good idea to check each content source for proper display.

I hope this discussion is useful to those working with the site in the future. If there are any questions you can e-mail me at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

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