Forum Moderators: not2easy
I'm doing a multi-year non-commercial historical research project. The content is mostly text, links, photos, and graphics. (How much? Hundreds, potentially low thousands of photos and graphics, each of which may have --probably should have-- accompanying text.) Some portions of the work are collaborative with people in other parts of the world. The final product is aimed at non-technical viewers, people who respond best to design simplicity, overall, and particularly with respect to site navigation.
So far I've been organizing on my computer the old-fashioned way, using files+directories. I've been composing site text in document editors and directly in Dreamweaver. I use ordinary email to collaborate. I publish mostly on a home-rolled site using ordinary HTML and PHP. Mostly, I'm using PHP to display a collapsible nav menu on all pages. Oh, yes, I use virtual "stickies" to track and prioritize.
This just isn't working: the throughput is much too low.
These individual methods I use are almost completely uncoordinated, so it takes too much work to move information through the process from discovery through collaboration to final publication.
Here is a brief sampling of specific problems:
Page-level access control on home-rolled sites is limited and awkward
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I need access control to keep collaborative work-in-progress private and to avoid copyright problems by implementing a credible members-only viewing policy for some material. (Of course, then, I need some way of managing memberships.)
Neglected stand-alone collapsible nav menu packages
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I installed what seemed to be the best, basic, 3+ level collapsible nav menu. It's a big pain to enter new items or modify existing ones. (The data is held in nested PHP arrays. One missing comma or paren, and ... the site is down.) This package and the other candidates aren't being actively supported, so there is small hope of improvement.
Email communications with one key collaborator is unreliable
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...So, I'm using the free, basic MindTouch Deki Express instead of email to exchange messages with her.
Using stickies to track and prioritize
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Do I have to say anything more?
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By now, you are probably screaming at your computer: "Use a CMS!"
But ... which one? Are there free or really-low-priced CMS products that apply?
If I use a CMS, will I fix my _local_ throughput problem, but find myself struggling with navigating the CMS to make even simple changes? To fix a misspelling in the welcome message of my home-rolled system requires about 30 seconds. A similar change in the light-weight CMS I'm using on another project significantly longer -- there's a lot of navigation to do.
Home-rolling, building from scratch, and self-maintaining site code can take a lot of time. But that may be preferable to expending endless effort trying to "persuade" a CMS to operate in a particular way --one that it seems to obviously support-- or to get a bug fixed. With respect to that light-weight CMS I'm using now, I have became convinced that almost no one in the quite active, dedicated user community has more than a surface understanding of the architecture or code.
(Yeah, I'll probably need to post a more focused version of this issue on the CMS forum.)
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If not a CMS, what? Are there any non-commercial tools that support Organizing -- Writing -- Collaborating -- Webpublishing in a comprehensive workflow?
Comments? Suggestions?
TIA,
Henry
