BReakfast?

October 25, 2002 | 3 Comments

Down at my day job I’ve been spending the last few days moving content into our new CMS. One of my goals in doing this was to clean the code as much as possible, remove any un-needed presentational tags and XHTML-ize it. Tedious job, but I think in the end it’ll be for the best. I took one file from 46 lines of code down to 8. Sounds fun huh? Yeah, I’m so excited, I can’t wait to get into the Frontpage stuff!! Whoopie!

In any case - part of what I’ve been doing is make a move to “meaningful semantic markup” as Tantek calls it. It’s harder than he makes it sound.

Filed under: Web Development

Comments

1. James said:

If you can tell us, what CMS are you using? I’ve been searching for good options in that regard.

Posted on October 25, 2002 06:42 PM | #

2. Smiley Cat said:

James,

We are using SiteMaker from MedSeek. It’s designed for hospitals in that it has a number of specially designed modules such as Directory of Services, Physicians Directory and so on. We’re excited starting the process of separating content from layout, and of managing distributed authorship.

Should be an interesting journey!

Posted on October 26, 2002 09:50 AM | #

3. dkr said:

Hey James - As Smiley Cat (one of my co-workers) said, the CMS we are using down at the hospital is SiteMaker - it’s geared specificly to hospitals and health care on a much smaller scale then say something like Vignette, which is what Wired News uses (I think). It’s nice but unless you are looking for a health care specific solution, I doubt it’d fit your needs.
We had already purchased the tool before I came on board so I didn’t get a change to view any others. In the past I’ve worked with Vignette and another one I can’t recall the name of off the top of my head - but those were one a much larger scale. What I can say is that while a CMS can help manage distributed authorship, and seperate your content from your presentation layer - they are not a cure all. Sometimes, as we’ve seen with SiteMaker, they can present interesting problems and at times can create more work. They can be a bit rigid. In general though, if you work in an organiztion with many content authors, I think some sort of CMS is a must.
Good luck man. Let me know how the search goes and how whatever CMS you end up using works out for you.

Posted on October 26, 2002 08:07 PM | #