Forum OpenACS CMS: Response to Status of comtemplation on CMS module

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Posted by Michael Feldstein on
<p>Karl, thanks for sharing the design doc for the new CMS. This quote from it pretty much sums up my own private assessment of it:</p>

<i><p>"Over the past six months, we have gained extensive experience using the package on client projects. In all cases, the user interface had to be modified extensively to meet the usability
requirements of the client. In several cases, we resorted to implementing simple authoring "wizards" for content producers, eliminating exposure to the user interface entirely.</p>

<p>"On a more positive note, the package has proven capable of meeting most of the functional requirements of our clients. Its feature list also compares favorably to many commercial CMS
applications. Our primary challenge for the next release is to expose those features in a manner that is easier to use out-of-the-box (or with minimal customization), is more accessible to all classes
of users and is more integrated with the rest of ACS."</p></i>

<p>The CMS in 4.x looks to me like it has most or all of the functionality I need (from a user perspective), but the interface makes it very difficult to assess.</p>

<p>If you're willing to put together some interface mock-ups (static pages are fine), I for one would be delighted to provide feedback. We could use <a href="http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/">Jakob Neilsen's heuristic usability testing methods</a> to make sure the feedback is helpful and follows well-tested rules of usability.</p>

<p>Of course, this only deals with the non-programming side. Perhaps if you'd be willing to post the data models (when they're done), the hackers here would be interested in digging into those as well.</p>