carthage webdev

We had the advantage of having built and lived with the previous content management system, so we all had a pretty good handle on what the new CMS would need to do. Most of it is pretty predictable stuff. We have news items, we have calendars of events, we have sporting events with scores, we have profiles of people, etc.

The academic departments and administrative offices all have some degree of autonomy, and so we treat them like clients. They can choose to have their sites managed through this CMS or not, and we need to be able to accommodate that. The two biggest clients are ourselves (for the home pages and other centralized content), the athletics department. Other important clients are undergraduate admissions, graduate admissions, and the music department.
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Having made the decision in early May to spend the summer building a replacement for Quahog, the next question was what to replace it with.
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As the webmaster for a small liberal arts college, I am responsible for a largish site with a very loosely defined set of controls. I inherited an environment where all of our 15,000 or so pages were maintained by hand, and have been moving toward automating bits and pieces. Two years ago, a few students (including Mike and Chris) built a content management system to manage a portion of Carthage's pages, most notably the home pages (one for on-campus and one for off-campus). That CMS, named Quahog in honor of the TV show "Family Guy," was built with Coldfusion. I'll discuss how we came to decide to move away from Quahog and Coldfusion in a subsequent post, but in a nutshell it came down to a desire on my part to learn something new rather than dissatisfaction with Coldfusion. (more…)

One of the ideas I had going into this summer was to maintain a blog about our experiences designing, building and deploying a content management system to run large portions of Carthage's web site. So without further ado, here we go. Ivan was kind enough to make the initial post, and now I am going to go back and start from the beginning, which in this case is the first couple weeks of May, 2006.
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