A Movable Type Intranet
December 29, 2003 | 
23 Comments
Down at the hospital we are in the process of moving a huge portion of our intranet into Movable Type — about 90%. This includes departmental sites, informational sites, applications and just about a bit of everything else.
It’s a really remarkable and interesting solution that I think will pay huge dividends. If it goes smoothly, which I have no doubt it should, we’re going to be able to provide very low cost (both in effort and monetarily) distributed authorship and increase functionality for both our users and stakeholders.
By providing them with not only a vehicle to update their pages themselves, but also with tools to provide news, announcements, knowledge management and more — we’re really taking a huge step forward in turning our intranet into something that should show some big enterprise-wide ROI. With out the cost and hassle of a “real” content management system.
We went down that road and found it sorely lacking.
All thanks to a simple blogging tool, some great plug-ins and some creative thinking. Oh, and for the standards geeks out there — the whole thing is built with valid (and tableless) XTHML and CSS as well.
I’ll get more into the details in later posts but I’ll give you a little background and an overview here. Both Brian Fling (my coworker) and I have been using Movable Type for personal project for a few years and we long ago came to realize that this is something we should begin to explore down at the hospital.
For our last redesign the team worked out a Movable Type solution for the home pages and “hub” pages so that the internal communications team could supply “channels” of news and announcements targeting the different audiences down at the hospital. We also used MT to run our events calendar.
When it came time to put solutions to goals, one of the larger being to reduce maintenance on our end with some kind of distributed authorship, we started to talk seriously about Movable Type and ways we could leverage it to help us out.
Both Brian and I had done some work with extending MT beyond the blog, pardon the expression, and his work on Seattleparent.org really proved that MT could be much more than a blogging technology.
I got to work on devising a “technology independent” Web standard template and Brian started working on a way to roll this MT solution out. What we came up with is a solution that, using MT, CSS and ASP includes, allows us to run almost the whole intranet off a handful of template pages.
At the same time we figured out ways to pull some of our applications into Movable Type. Things like our Policies and Procedures and Electronic Forms pages, which once were quite the bear to maintain, proved to be a natural fit and are now as easy as adding or editing an entry in MT.
We’re doing some unorthodox things so I imagine we’ll have to develop some kind of curriculum to get our content owners up and running, but I don’t think it’ll be any harder than if we’d had some other content management system set up.
What’s more is that we can leverage Movable Type itself to help us do this. We’re using a modified version of MT-Textile to help get our content owners up to speed with styling entries and we’ve put into place a few K-logs to help document problems, tips and tricks and anything else pertaining to this stuff. This has been a great help to the internal Web team.
It’s also become a supplementary project management tool.
I take a week off and I can come back, check the K-log to see what’s new or if any issues have popped up, etc. It’s really great. We hope to roll similar solutions our to other departments in the hospital as well.
In any case, you can probably tell I’m pretty excited about it. At some point I’ll try and get into a bit more detail about how it all works, but to be honest, it’s not all that complicated. Anyone with solid goals, a plan and a good understanding of the related technologies could put something like this into place.
Don’t let anyone tell you that you need to spend thousands of dollars to do distributed authorship or content management the right way. It’s simply not true.
Filed under: Web Development
Comments
1. andrew said:
Good luck with this. You will probably find that the MT interface, simple as it is, is too complex for some people in the organiation. Don’t underestimate the difficulty of getting people to change their habits to accomodate any CMS.
I did a small scale intranet project using MT, basically several project blogs that were aggregated into a company-wide project status blog. Aside from getting the cron stuff worked out to automatically rebuild the company-wide blog often enough, it was a decent solution. I’m hoping that MT 3 Pro will make some performance and security improvements that would really make it a more serious contender for big corporate sites.
Posted on December 29, 2003 11:45 AM | #
2. Keith said:
One thing I didn’t mention, which addresses the interface issue Andrew brings up – we’ve been working on customizing the Movable Type interface itself. This is being done to deal with this very issue.
So far what we’ve got seems to be much less complex. We’re still working on it. It’s actually fairly easy to work with.
I do agree that with some folks this will be an issue no matter what we do, but so far it’s gone fairly smooth for the people we’ve piloted MT with.
Also - not everyone who has a site will have to make updates themselves. With many of the sites our internal Web team will still take care of the maintenance. It’s just much easier to do that work in MT as opposed to FrontPage or whatever. Much, much easier.
This is one of the benefits of using a template driven solution. Between the CSS, ASP includes and MT templates we only have an handful of files to worry about for site wide changes.
Oh, and I’m also really stoked about MT 3.0. Not only for our projects down at the hospital, but this site as well.
Posted on December 29, 2003 11:54 AM | #
3. mahalie said:
Hey guys - I’ve been wanting to use MT to power a community blog - visualizeballard.org similar to seatleparent.org. I’m just getting into MT and getting up to speed on standards (after a 2 year hiatus from web design). I’ve searched and have yet to find a striaightforward guide or how to for using MT to manage a whole site, any insight on this would be great! Looking forward to hearing more about this intranet project, too. There are opportunities for this at my work as well, but I am the entire web development team…so we’ll see how well I catch on.
Posted on December 29, 2003 12:29 PM | #
4. Keith said:
Mahalie - Here are a few articles you might look at:
Doing your whole site with MT
Beyond the Blog
Rebuilding a Portfolio
If I have more time I’ll try and post something here with a bit more “meat” about how to do this. Movable Type is actually pretty easy to work with, you just need to think creatively and keep at it.
Luckily lots of folks have already done that.
We spent a whole bunch of time digging through various plug-ins (there are some great ones out there) and I’ve also spent a good chunk of time on MT’s Support Forums. Those are both really good resources.
As someone who lives on Ballard’s doorstep (Queen Anne) it’ll be interested to see what you come up with.
Posted on December 29, 2003 12:54 PM | #
5. Mike said:
I’m really glad that people are starting to suggest using MT to power larger corporate-type sites. You don’t need Interwoven as a CMS in order to get things done.
Too bad Mena and Co. didn’t come out with MT Pro before you redesigned everything, maybe that could have saved you a lot of third-party plugin wrangling :)
PS: Long time reader, first time commenter. I’ve always loved your site!
Posted on December 30, 2003 12:19 PM | #
6. Adam Gaffin said:
Congrats! We’re doing the same basic thing on our intranet (but with Apache SSI and JSP instead of ASP). Did you do anything special to use MT as a calendar (for example, to expire old entries or to get recurrent events to span multiple days or weeks)?
Posted on January 12, 2004 06:42 AM | #
7. Ari Paparo said:
I’d like to hear more about how you did the calendar. I developed an MT Intranet which is working great and is used by the whole company; but the calendar is just a PHP hack.
Ari
Posted on January 12, 2004 10:39 AM | #
8. James said:
I’ve done lots of this kind of work, but I’m eternally frustrated that everything in MT is tied to chronology. If they could get out of that “just a blog” mindset, it would be a *huge* advance for MT as a content management system!
Posted on January 12, 2004 11:52 AM | #
9. Jason said:
Did you consider some sort of Wiki solution before deciding on MT?
Posted on January 12, 2004 11:55 AM | #
10. Keith said:
Ari and Adam - We did our events calendar as a fairly straightforward blog. The only trick is that with ever entry you need to go in and change the date posted to make the date of the event so that it rolls off correctly. It’s not perfect and we’re looking at ways to improve it.
Oh and Adam, the fact that you use JSP is one of the things I love about MT. You can use JSP, I use PHP here, we use ASP down on the Intranet…it plays very well with others.
Read this more recent post for more on that.
James - I agree with you, MT does seem to be tied to chronology. However all you need is a bit of creative thinking to get around that. We have department sites set up in MT where each page (about, contact, whatever) is an entry. These are tied to a date, but only very loosely.
Jason - we talked briefly a while back about Wikis, but to be honest didn’t explore it to far. I think because no one on the team has much experience with them to be honest. From what little I know I do think they could be very good for parts of our Intranet. However (and remember that I’m not all that familiar with them) they seem like they might be a bit too open and too flexible for our users. MT is a stretch in some cases as it is.
Posted on January 12, 2004 12:25 PM | #
11. KO said:
I’m just wondering, how are you dealing with multipile authors editing the same entry/post? Does MT check for that? I don’t think it does, so that would be an issue?
Also, if you heavily customize MT, won’t it be a royal pain upgrading to 3.0 or pro when it comes out? Or with such a large project, does it make more sense to make it work and then just stick with it… mt 3.0 is supposed to have a XHTML/CSS interface so that should make customizing the user interface a lot easier.
Posted on January 12, 2004 09:35 PM | #
12. Keith said:
KO – as far as we know the multiple author / single post shouldn’t be an issue. I can’t think of anywhere we’d need to worry about that at least. I imagine if it does come up we’ll figure something out.
As far as MT 3.0, customization and upgrading go, your right that it is a bit of a concern, but we just couldn’t wait. If we find that it’s going to be hard to upgrade, we’ll just keep what we’ve got until we can figure it all out.
What we have going now is working well so my guess is that even if 3.0 were to show up tomorrow, we’d not really look into it for at least a couple months. But I’m not 100% sure.
Posted on January 12, 2004 11:47 PM | #
13. Jens Hansen said:
You wouldn’t happen to have some screenshots to visualize your work?
Posted on January 13, 2004 04:09 AM | #
14. Keith said:
Jens – I could get some. Not sure how they’d help as the site pretty much looks like any other Intranet site, but if I have time I’ll post some.
Posted on January 13, 2004 10:00 AM | #
15. padawan said:
Great example, thanks for sharing.
As far as the interface is concerned, I’m a big fan of desktop applications for posting. If you have a Mac, you should check either NetNewsWire or ecto (formerly known as Kung-Log). They’re not free but:
1. you’ll find that once the application is setup (less complicated than setting an Outlook account), managing the content is a lot easier than through a web browser, and if you save half a day of training your people, that’ll pay for it;
2. they’re aggregators too, a must-have for your content managers when your site does RSS ;-).
ecto is being ported to Windows, and I’m sure there are other applications out there for the Windows users out there.
Posted on January 14, 2004 08:19 AM | #
16. herbert kornfeld said:
The correct usage is “crazy mad props”, not “big props”.
Posted on February 28, 2004 08:46 PM | #
17. Jonathan Furness said:
It seems that you haven’t found Drupal yet! There are lots of weblogging tools out there, but not many that have adaptable and extendable modules that are easy to follow and understand. Take a look.
Posted on March 11, 2004 04:20 PM | #
18. John said:
“we’re really taking a huge step forward in turning our intranet into something that should show some big enterprise-wide ROI. With out the cost and hassle of a “real” content management system.”
We are also considering using MT for our intranet’s CMS, but wondering about the license fee, if any. Did you pay for the commercial license? Did you discuss this with the MT peope to be sure you don’t need to buy the commercial license.
Thank you or anyone for information abou this.
Posted on March 25, 2004 03:25 PM | #
19. Keith said:
Jonathan (#19) – I have looked at Drupal and while I think it’s nice, it wasn’t what I was looking for. It was a bit much and frankly I found it a bit hard to pick up and it seemed a bit less flexible in many ways.
I’m not knocking it, I’m quite sure you could do pretty much the same thing with Drupal. It just wasn’t right for us.
John (#24) – We’re a non-profit, so we didn’t need the commercial license. If we had needed it, we’d have paid. It’s miniscule in comparison to many CMS systems out there.
Posted on March 28, 2004 01:09 PM | #
20. David said:
Keith,
How did the hospital’s policy and procdure project work out? Can you set things up so only certain people have the right to post or edit pnps and everyone else just can view them?
Thanks,
d
Posted on April 16, 2004 06:01 PM | #
21. shaun said:
In looking at MT for a university-wide intranet, I’m curious to know if there is any way to tie it into LDAP for user/commenter/login authentication?
Thanks
Posted on April 22, 2004 08:06 AM | #
22. Andre said:
I, too, am looking a using MT as an intranet tool. I’m sort of a novice at all of this, but MT seems to be the best choice. Can anyone tell me the best place to look in order to customize the templates? Does MT offer any kind of access restrictions to certain users or groups?
Thanks
Posted on October 11, 2004 08:41 AM | #
23. kaushal parikh said:
It seems that you haven�€™t found Drupal yet! There are lots of weblogging tools out there, but not many that have adaptable and extendable modules that are easy to follow and understand. Take a look.
Posted on November 11, 2004 01:16 PM | #
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