At 10:24 27/05/05 -0400, Andrew Macdonald wrote:
A CMS can be costly and so complicated that no one wants to use it. When it comes down to it, many times hiring someone with knowledge of the web will save you headaches and money.
There's a lot of truth in that. A CMS really comes into its own when you want it do more than run one website. The one we used on the TAMH project - managed the website, a local touchscreen application and a CD-ROM for school use. It also output images and generated whatever flavour of XML had to go with them at the time for other projects' use. There are some papers on it at http://www.tamh.org/tamh/papers/index.php (they are rather out of date as we've spent more time in recent years implementing the strategy than talking about it) Would never have occurred to me (having no money) to go out and buy an off-the-shelf solution. Ours was built in-house over time and versions of it work with museum sites and commercial applications such as a holiday booking system and a real estate database where vendors add and edit their own property details. The level of difficulty in implementing something like this depends largely on where you start. It's a lot easier if you begin with an existing database (even one in a horrible proprietary Collections Management System) which you can export elsewhere and re-fit with link tables, SQL and scripting. Everything we have done in this area has been built around LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) which has the great attraction of being free.
The Clearances site www.theclearances.org is built on a CMS which manages everything including things like passenger list output in XML and proprietary formats. We have also developed an exhibition tool, a CMS which sits on top of a CMS allowing quick generation of temporary exhibitions combining existing assets with whatever new material curators wish to add. This may never see the light of day as a commercial product but it certainly proves the ease with which different databases and media types can be combined and managed.
Douglas The Highland Clearances http://www.theclearances.org --- You are currently subscribed to mcn_mcn-l as: [email protected] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [email protected]
