Minutes of Nov 16, 2007 meeting
Topic of CS vs. Dreamweaver/Contribute was brought up and Matt clarified that it may have been simplifying things to think about this process as a choice between these two products, but that in reality, many other options exist
- Response: This may be true, but there was a good deal of effort that went into selecting CS in the first place (3 years ago) and we're not in a position to initiate another search for a CMS at this time.
- This opinion was not shared by everyone and by the end of the meeting it was suggested that perhaps we should look into other CMS solutions in-depth since CS was chosen by a larger group for different reasons
- possibility that it's not the best option for this project
Dec 5th meeting
Interview with Dave DeMello re. ILR use of Commonspot - pros and cons.
Does well:
Templates, security issues, enforce initial design, story types, manage and propagate change with lots of granularity
Does not do well: Custom elements (e.g., no support for collection data types), has API but does not offer enough benefits, can't share elements easily among CS sites, can only send 'recipe' and others have to recreate it.
ILR is a CS success story because CS does for them what they wanted done (page driven site with discrete content added organically, incrementally, hierarchical site, collaborative authorship)There are a thousand content management systems out there - evaluation is a huge deal - some might be better for Cornell than others but he would pick CS again for ILR - he has peace of mind about succession planning - there is a supportive community on campus around CS - if in 5 years CU wants to move to another system we should all do it together.
There was no mention of platforms again in minutes again until May 22 meeting when decision had already been made.
Technical Subcommitte
Technical Evaluation by the Design Subgroup
CUL Vision Report - Web Site Development Recommendations
Platforms finally evaluated
- CommonSpot 5
- Contribute/Dreamweaver
- Drupal
Contribute/Dreamweaver was eliminated quickly
- produces a static site that is hard to maintain
- no CUL system integration or content re-use
Commonspot vs. Drupal
- Open source provides options for flexibility, debugging, testing that proprietary code and database definitions does not.
- DLIT has very little ColdFusion expertise, lots of php experience.
- Commonspot 5 required upgrading servers to ColdFusion 7 and upgrading all 16 sites from previous version.
- Commonspot costs $5500 per year, upgrade to CF7 would be around $2500. It also requires a dedicated server.
- Drupal would be implemented on existing servers without interfering with their current uses.
Conclusions of the report