It's important to put CMS's on a spectrum of means of storing and connecting information: - Email - Web site (naive version) - Blog - Wiki - Online documents - CMS
E-mail is point-to-point communication between an author and a group. Archiving is typically on a per-author basis. E-mail can include links to sites. Some providers insert links and ads in the content of the e-mail or in the reader environment. There are abbreviation services that make it easier to send long links that might otherwise get broken during transmission. A web site is created by a designer, populated by an author, and made available. It may have structure built in that connects the pages, that offers invitations of various kinds, and that provides context for users arriving from other places. A blog is created by an author as part of a time series. The web site aspects are often pre-determined or only lightly customizable. This makes a blog easier to create than a new web site. A blog has a comment feature that allows readers to annotate individual pages. The blogroll, trackback and permalink features connect a blog with other blogs and occasionally with other non-blog sites. A wiki is a collaboration environment in which each page is created individually by an author. Other authors can modify the page or contribute to an associated talk page. There is a naming mechanism that makes it easier to create links to pages by title, and a tagging or category mechanism that groups pages that mention a common subject. As with a hand-crafted web site, there is a need for some common practices in page titles, category assignments, and linking conventions in order to ensure that information remains findable. Online documents provide a collaboration environment in which multiple authors can update information and see each others' updates in something approximating real time. The update frequency determines how dynamically authors can interact through the online document. The internal structure of an online document is modeled after traditional desktop application documents. Online documents reside in an external framework that is modeled after a file system. A content management system is a collaboration environment in which each page of information that the user sees is built from multiple pieces. The pieces each have individual identifiers that are independent of their title. There may be a file system view that can be used to organize the pieces, but the file system relies on the internal identifiers rather than the other way around. A CMS typically allows content to be tagged or categorized, and usually the categories can be organized into a hierarchy called a taxonomy. In order to construct content pages in a CMS, it is not only necessary to design content templates. In addition, the taxonomy and the types of pieces that will be supported need to be designed. This determines the types of content pages that can be constructed. Blogs, wikis, online documents, and CMS's share common issues with participation. In each case, readers judge the content by how recently it has been updated, how carefully it has been authored, whether the authors seem to have been careful about writing authoritative content, and whether the content has since been superseded. In order to make the transition to contributor, a reader must be convinced that their contribution will be valuable, either by increasing the contributor's visibility, or by improving the understanding of subsequent readers. Wikis and CMS's also have social issues: how to deal with clashes among contributors. It can happen that different contributors have different perspectives on what needs to be said, or different frames on which to base their remarks. It can be very difficult to re-frame existing contributions to track an emerging consensus about the framework underlying the discussion. In this sense, a blog is a better technology for conversation that is based on a fluid set of assumptions. A wiki can be a place for consensus-building when the community agrees to focus their consensus-building efforts there. Traditionally, CMS's have concentrated on enabling content to be published, but not on serving as a forum for consensus-building. Consequently, a community using a CMS often designates specialists to serve as authors in particular subject areas. These specialists can be called owners, which would be considered too strong a term in the culture surrounding a wiki. The sense of ownership is made necessary in part by the difficulty of producing a coherent result from multiple small pieces. Each owner acts as editor of a subject-matter area, ensuring that the required assets are available to support the presentation of a particular point. This brings us back to web sites, since a CMS can serve as the back end for a web site. A CMS is a powerful mechanism that permits generation of pages that are adapted to the user and their session history. But because of the extra layer of design requirements (for the taxonomy and the content types), it only pays to use a CMS for sites above a certain scale, or when a number of sites are being constructed that follow a common pattern. Best wishes, Bruce Esrig Madison, NJ On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 9:57 AM, Brian Henkel < brian.hen...@manifestdigital.com> wrote: > I'm planning to teach a course on how knowledge of Content Management > Systems makes us better user experience designers. In this course, we > will survey many prevalent CMS tools (slated at the moment: WordPress, > Drupal, Joomla, Sharepoint, Expression Engine) to review how they work, > analyze their capabilities and limitations, and overall, make > non-technical designers more conversant with these technologies. It is > my belief that this background not only helps a designer when > formulating/proposing a solution, but is also valuable in discussions > with other (perhaps more-technical) project team members. > > > > I'd like to get thoughts and ideas from the community: How does > knowledge of Content Management Systems make us better user experience > designers? Literature on this topic seems to be scarce, so a > recommendation for further research is welcomed as well. > > > > > > > > Brian Henkel > User Experience > > Manifest Digital > 1200 West Lake Street > Chicago, IL 60607 > manifestdigital.com > > 312 235 3024 v > 773 331 7645 c > 312 803 9669 f > > > > ________________________________________________________________ > 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
