Hi Jennifer, I've been working with two different CMS tools for the past 4 years. Stellent initially but more heavily these days with Percussion. They're both relatively robust systems so my opinions only from those experiences.
CMS tools are mostly a one-to-one mapping for the primary template to a primary content type or folder. But for with the projects I've been on, I've been both the interface designer for the websites as well as the CMS implementer. This gives me a good bit of say as to how many content types and primary templates should be created. I've found that there are two main ways to make a CMS and UX person work well together, and that's through content chunking and modular templating. Content chunking for a CMS focuses on breaking down a content type into it's atomic data parts. Things like: display title, description, intro, body, callout, url maybe, keywords, etc. The focus of content chunking is to figure out how to reuse pieces of information. Percussion is a baking CMS and produces static pages, so the best way is to leverage the use of that one piece of data and reuse it in multiple instances. That way if that piece of data is updated it's updated everywhere it's used. For a designer, you can also figure out how to use those chunks of data, where to use it, when, why, and what triggers would cause the usage of it. A display title could in an page title tag in one instance but only has the title for an item in a list of links in another. We would have to come up with the rules on how to use these chunks of content so that we or the developers can implement them in the templates. Percussion assigns a type-specific template (the primary template) to a single content type. But you can also have shared templates which can be called by anything. So chunks of content can be filtered through a multitude of templates depending on the needs of that page and the purpose and use of that particular piece of content. What I've implemented in my current project is a content type called "Buckets". The content authors can create buckets and put prose in them, lists, images, etc. Depending on what page is calling the bucket, depending on where on the page the bucket is being called, the content of that Bucket content item can serve various purposes. It can also be assigned to various pages. The visual look and feel I define purely by the CSS. One template can have the datafield "displaytitle" show up as an H1 tag looking one particular way while another template can have that same displaytitle show up as bolded text styled by a class in a div tag. Even on content type specific templates I provide my content authors the ability to choose between one column, two column, or three column layouts. Depending on the layout, different related content can be pulled from different buckets. So with modular templating you can also have templates that change their elements based on what's calling it, where it's being called, or maybe as specific as a singular piece of item. For example, I have a global template (basically the wrapper consisting of the header, footer, and global nav) but based on what folder and what content type is being called, logos change, header titles change, and even global navigation change. But it's all still one template. So it's our responsibility to define the purpose of what's going to happen, why it's going to happen, where it'll happen, how it should happen, and what triggers it. So even if you're stuck with 2 or 4 templates, those templates can still do various things. Hope that helps, Thai On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 12:35 PM, Jennifer Wolfgang <chicgee...@gmail.com>wrote: > Hi all, > > I'll be honest, though I've worked in web design and development for almost > 13 years, I've never - until now - had to work with a CMS on a static site. > I've implemented an early version of eMPower (Ektron), but that was years > ago and it was pretty basic: no 'templates' or 'modules' to be concerned > about. > > For the past year, I've worked at a company that uses a Perl-based CMS; the > majority of our site uses this CMS, and the site is static because it is > "decoupled". We have templates, and modules that those templates use, that > were crudely built (no planning, just a dump when the CMS was implemented). > > All that to say that I'm having the darndest time figuring out how to > design > / structure new pages because of the limitations of the templates and > modules. I'm used to being able to create an interface that is custom to > the > content and structural needs of the page/path (as needed) - not to mention > for a dynamic site - that I'm struggling for how to do my job well while > working under such constraints. Another huge element, at least for us, is > that we are extremely limited on resources. So, if it's a matter of "have > your developers work with you to build what you need," I'm sorry to say > that's not an option. We have 2 full time developers, and would need to > hire > contractors (in Germany, where the CMS company is located). Yet, we are a > large global company. It's just weird. :) > > Thus I'm curious: is this a common issue for UX designers? That is, are > there things I need to learn about working with a CMS, static or otherwise, > that will help me fulfill my role better? > > Thanks, > Jennifer > ________________________________________________________________ > Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! > To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org > Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe > List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines > List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help > ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
