Using the university Content Management System
The Marketing and Communications department has created the university Content Management System with the goal to centralize all the Web sites into a central system and hosting environment and to provide the content writers throughout the university a tool to update their own content without having to install any additional software.
URL: http://cms.wayne.edu/
Training Manual
Features
LDAP Authentication
Connects to the current [http://wayne.edu WSU] LDAP so there is no need to remember a seperate username and password.
Database Driven
The CMS uses MySQL to store all the data, but writes static pages to the server to minimize server load and increase response time.
Site Management
Each Site can have sub sites which are completely independent site with their own users/template/menus/news/files etc.. except they have the ability to inherit users/template/menus/news from their parent site.
An Example of this is [http://hr.wayne.edu/ Human Resources]. They have six sites underneath their main HR site. All the sub sites pages use the main HR's template but use their own menus and files. All of the sites on the front end look seamless transition to the user, but each site has very specific needs and users/permissions and files.
Page Management
Facility to Add/Edit/Delete pages.
Maintains a backup of five previous changes in pages
Allows to move pages between sites and folders
Search the content of pages of a site for keywords
Multiple Templates
Sites have the ability to have multiple templates, when creating page the user gets to choose what template they would like their page in.
Multiple Menus
Sites have the ability to have multiple menus, when creating page the user gets to choose what menu they would like to display on the page.
Personal Profile Manager
A site administrator can decide on fields that would pertain to users within their site. These fields can range from a phone number to a biography to an upload file of their CV.
These fields once filled out can be pulled into the site in numerous ways. Some examples are Socialwork [http://www.socialwork.wayne.edu/faculty_profiles.php Faculty] and [http://www.socialwork.wayne.edu/staff_profiles.php Staff] which fills their [http://www.socialwork.wayne.edu/research.php research] page from all the profiles, this page will be updated automatically when the users profiles update.
Allows the user to update/edit their own profile.
Faculty Profile Manager
The Ability for grant a user the rights to add/edit/delete profiles from a specific site, if the profile users are unaware or are not interested in updating their profiles themselves, a user within the department can update all of them.
The Site Administrator defines groups and subgroups for their users in the Faculty Profile tool, this allows them to be categorized and separated on the front end of the site.
User Levels/Group Management
Users have different permission levels in CMS. Users with higher permissions can add/modify data created by users with lower or equal permissions.
User Management
Easy addition of users simply by AccessID. It will automatically pick up their first and last name.
Users can have access to multiple sites and a different permission level for each site.
File Manager
Allows the user to Add/Edit/Remove folders.
Allows the user to upload and delete files within the folders
The files are written to the sites directory plus backed up outside the site directory so the site can be rebuilt from scratch if needed.
Custom 404 Pages
A 404 page can be created with the look and feel of each site.
A template and menu can be chosen to appear on the 404 page is someone arrived at an incorrect URL. This is a more friendly response to the user instead of the average 404 page since it includes the menu of the site.
The text on 404 pages can be customized to what ever the site admin desires.
An example of this is [http://hr.wayne.edu/badlink.php Human Resources]
Google Sitemap Generator
Each night a Google sitemap is created which contains all pages associated with a site and is submitted to google for indexing.
This occurs for every site in the CMS an example sitemap is located on [http://hr.wayne.edu/sitemap.xml Human Resources]
Image Gallery Manager
Each site can have one or multiple image galleries.
Each Gallery can have a title and a description.
A Gallery can have a Start Date and an End Data for delayed launch or limiting its time online.
Each image in the galleries can have a title and description which are optional.
[http://rfc.wayne.edu/gallery.php Recreation and Fitness Center] has a good example of the Image Gallery implementation
News Manager
Add/Edit/Delete news items.
Each news item can have a title, link, start date, end date and the actual article text.
News can be submitted for approval on the wayne.edu homepage if desired.
Ability to use images instead of text for the news titles if the template accommodates.
News can be ordered either by date or by specified order.
News can be archived after it had expired to separate it out from the active news but still keep its information available.
Active news items can be pulled to the homepage in a "mini" news section.
An RSS feed is automatically created and updated when news is updated.
An example would be [http://socialwork.wayne.edu/ Socialwork] and an [http://socialwork.wayne.edu/news.xml RSS] example is also created
Abbreviations
We store a list of common words and the abbreviations in the CMS, each time a page is written to the server the abbreviations are checked and they are replaced with the <abbr> tag.
So "GPA" would be written as "<abbr title="Grade Point Average">GPA</abbr>"
This is to automate some of the process of creating Accessible pages.
WYSIWYG Editor
Has a WYSIWYG editor to write pages, templates or articles. The editor is easy to use and has a Word like interface that allows to easily bold, italicize, change fonts etc for words. It also allows to make bullets, links etc within the editor.
Currently the CMS is using the [http://www.fckeditor.net/ FCK Editor] but it will soon be replaced by the [http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/ TinyMCE] Editor which offers better cross browser support.
Orphan Pages
A list of pages in the CMS that are not linked from any other page or menu in the site can be obtained.
Newsletter feature
Allows each site to have a newsletter with different categories and articles.
These can be on a subscription (like monthly or weekly) or on a continious basis each time an article is added it can be published.
Allows the user to specify different categories and save articles in these. These articles can be sent out as newsletter.
Currently there is no example because no site has implemented this feature yet.
Bug Tracker
Allows the user to report any bugs they may find while using the CMS or their site.
Each issue is worked through and every action is logged in the bug tracker.
Rebuild Site
Allows the site admin to easily rebuild the site with all the newest updated data.
This will update all pages/news/menus/template/caches with all the newest information from the database.