Andre Milton wrote: > So this brings up a good CM geek point: upstream or > public content. CMSs are often limited by > downstream publication requiring all content > modifications to be done on the staging server > before publication to the production servers. A > public user accessing the production server usually > never sees the staging server (which is often behind > a firewall as well) so s/he won't be able to > contribute content.
We're mostly working with a static publication model that's staged to production because there's a main need for "control" and a strong version history (prompted through Federal regulation in this case). However, the content is highly technical and user feedback is imperative. Due to legalities, though, formal approval is required for content changes so users submit comments/feedback specific to individual pages/documents/sections (unlike something like Wicki, we tend to use a small core team to perform final updates). We're mostly reliant upon a "Comments?/Feedback?" link on the web page, or user reference to location information in printed publications. So, I guess it's the "stupid, but it works, so it's not stupid" kind of solution. Despite the "control" aspect where updates are only made by the organization publishing the content, I'm a *very* big fan of intimately involving users in feedback and content review. It's even helpful to simply have another pair of eyes watching spelling and grammar (mistakes always get through... we're talking lots of content, much is esoteric due to specialized research interest). Ultimately, the goal for many of our systems is constant content addition *on par with* constant content review and constant data cleaning. "Long lived" content is the most trusted content in our case, since we're always cleaning and pruning and validating with new content. Yeah, I know that sounds weird because big systems typically mean content gets out-of-date faster than you can keep up with it. But, we have the benefit that we're talking research that was performed, data sets that were collected, and values that were measured from research activities. So, we may later flaw an entire experiment or research effort, but it's still an immutable record of what was. (Sometimes the flaw is due to poor implementation/execution, but usually it's due to interdependencies not understood at the time; later re-analysis with new information sometimes lets us derive content that was completely unanticipated.) > I've seen quite a few creative work arounds for > this but I'd like to know how devs on this list > handle it. I'm also *very* interested in other ideas (processes or technologies) to promote user contribution. It would be nice to have multiple channels of feedback from users, IMHO. Pursuit of the ever elusive tacit knowledge, eh? ;-) > I'd also like to hear those that are against it. :) I'm curious as to business cases for this as well. Traditional "static" publishing doesn't emphasize user feedback (here's my work of fiction, read and enjoy), but it seems like *everybody* has a, "Comment on this story!" at the bottom of their publications now. Is that *really* a universally applicable thing anymore?? BTW, for this current thread of "Forum/Email List" integration with "CMS", I think there needs to be a good mechanism where emails and forum discussions are able to integrate easily into the formal CMS. In some of our environments, the forum generates maybe 30% of the formal content (yes, it needs to be cleaned and organized, but the original authors/sources are always cited, so the thread history/context must somehow be referenced or preserved). --charley [EMAIL PROTECTED] __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com -- http://cms-list.org/ trim your replies for good karma.
