carthage webdev

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.

My plan is to use this blog to discuss the trials and tribulations of replacing one home-grown CMS with another, and to do it from a variety of points of view. The point is not at all to present this blog as a "best practices" primer on the right way to do things. I want this to be a lightly-edited first-hand account of what we actually ran into as we dove into Django. And Python, which was also new for all of us. This sort of up-close and personal glimpse into the train wreck, I mean character building opportunity, is the sort of thing that I was hoping to come across earlier in our investigation and that could turn out to be useful for others who will follow after us into the promised land of Django.

First, I supose some introductions are in order. My name is Dave Robinson and I have been Carthage's webmaster for 5 and a half years. Running a web site was a bit of a career change, and I have had to teach myself quite a bit as I've gone along. (I don't have any formal training in anything computer related – I was an urban planner for 5 years in the late '90s.) A year ago I was able to hire a graduating student, Mike Kishline, who had been working with me since the summer before his freshman year, so we've learned a lot together. Chris Dary is a senior computer science major at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and he has been working with Mike and me for several years. Ivan Manolov is a senior computer science major at Carthage who has been working with me for a year and a half.

I am not doing much coding this summer – my responsibilities are drifting more toward content, marketing, strategic communications, managing, yada yada yada. Basically, I am becoming a pointy-haired boss. I am involved in making design decisions about what Mike, Chris and Ivan build, so I have had to get up to speed enough to be able to have intelligent conversations and make informed decisions when situations arise where I have to make a call. In addition to the three coders, we have two people helping out on a variety of projects, including some data conversion/clean up/data entry. Erin, a junior at Carthage; and Jeremy, a student at St. Olaf are becoming increasingly valuable members of the Sputnik team now that the CMS is starting to come together and the rollout of the first client is approaching.

The name of the new CMS is Sputnik, which is a bit of an inside joke. An image of 3 red Lego astronauts is the logo.

I'll describe the scope of our project, and some background about the CMS that Sputnik will replace, (and whatever else seems worth going into) as time permits.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 8th, 2006 at 9:37 pm and is filed under Dave, backstory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.