Forum OpenACS CMS: CMS system and further development of the Arsdigita sollution ..

1: CMS system and further development of the Arsdigita sollution ..

Posted by Jørgen Skogstad on 07/25/01 09:33 PM

Hi there ..

I was wondering what the OpenACS team have for ideas .. to further
develop the Arsdigita's CMS as they will focus on their java stuff. I
am in the works of developing a few sites that use their CMS .. and
would love to contribute as much as I can.

.. but I havn't actually gotten a clear picture on what the "road
ahead" with OpenACS is yet. Mostly because I've not been hanging
around here much .. until now! ;)

.. kindest,
Jørgen Skogstad

2: Response to CMS system and further development of the Arsdigita sollution .. (response to 1)

Posted by Michael Feldstein on 07/25/01 11:56 PM

Welcome to the community!

As I understand it the team is working right now on a straight port
of the CMS from ACS 4.x Tcl. In general, you can look check out a
(more-or-less) weekly progress report on OpenACS porting
here:

http://openacs.org/new-file-storage/one-file?file_id=77

Once the straight port is complete, the team will look at
improving the package. Two high priorities are fixing the UI
(which is pretty horrific) and making CMS subsite-aware.

Perhaps Dan Wickstrom or Roberto Mello (the two package
owners) will be able to give you more detailed info about their
progress. In fact, if you're serious about contributing you should
email them directly and offer to help.

3: Response to CMS system and further development of the Arsdigita sollution .. (response to 1)

Posted by Roberto Mello on 07/26/01 02:03 AM

It's pretty much as Michael described. Dan has finished porting his portion of CMS, and I'm the one that needs to finish the rest of the package, my goal being to finish it by the end of next week max.

4: Response to CMS system and further development of the Arsdigita sollution .. (response to 1)

Posted by Jørgen Skogstad on 07/26/01 08:17 AM

Ok! Great .. when you have finished it I would be more than happy to contribute to the further development of the CMS. I just need to finish two projects locally using the v4 of the ACS with the CMS .. and when those two are operational time is at hand.

.. are there any "project trackers" for the cms and such? Who are steering the development and the features to implement and such?

Have a real nice day!

Kindest,
Jørgen Skogstad

5: Response to CMS system and further development of the Arsdigita sollution .. (response to 1)

Posted by Roberto Mello on 07/26/01 04:32 PM

We haven't come up with people "steering" CMS yet because it's not ported. We created this bboard exactly to discuss these issues, so you're welcome to join and participate.

Don Baccus leads the OpenACS 4.x project, and we have a status page and other information at http://openacs.org/4

6: Response to CMS system and further development of the Arsdigita sollution .. (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 07/31/01 06:54 PM

Welcome ... Roberto's summary's 100% correct. We also have the problem that few people here have actually used the CMS other than to play around with it.

Since you've been developing sites with it, I know we'd all value your criticisms of the CMS as it exists today, and any ideas you might have for improvements.

So, as you have time to do so, feel free to post new threads here and share your thoughts. We're trying to do our thinking "out loud", in the open on the bboards, as much as possible so everyone has a chance to follow the discussion and add their $0.02 worth.

7: Response to CMS system and further development of the Arsdigita sollution .. (response to 1)

Posted by Tom Mizukami on 07/31/01 07:34 PM

I evaluated this version of the CMS for the pharmaceutical company I work at. One of the glaring design errors was the way the CMS uses a hardwired workflow. You should be able to route any content item on any defined workflow. I hope this and many of the UI problems can receive attention once the initial porting work is completed. In fact, this is one application that I would have voted to not port "as is".

8: Response to CMS system and further development of the Arsdigita sollution .. (response to 1)

Posted by Dan Wickstrom on 08/01/01 04:30 AM

Allowing content items to be routed on any workflow shouldn't be that difficult of a problem to fix. But, even if that problem was fixed, you would still be left with a UI that is very difficult to use, especially for a non-technical person who doesn't understand the data-model. The cms UI as it stands now seems to be a thin veneer over the data-model, and I recall somebody at aD once stated that the cms UI was not intended for anybody other than developers. I had a hard time believing that claim, but I would believe somebody if they claimed that the UI is unusable by non-developers.

As far as porting it as is, I think it still is a useful exercise. The data-model for cms seems to well thought out, so I think alot of it will be reusable. A completely different UI is necessary. Currently, the workflow integration is pretty light, and I think more extensive use of workflow and the addition of some type of wizard mechanism for publishing content would go a long ways towards improving the cms UI. Currently everything is task driven, and you need to know all of the tasks necessary to publish content. Also there is no central control area that tells you what you need to know in order to publish a content item. Each of the tasks that are needed to publish a content item are distributed through a bunch of different panels, so getting something accomplished in the cms UI involves quite a bit of trial and error until you get the hang of it.

9: Response to CMS system and further development of the Arsdigita sollution .. (response to 1)

Posted by Jørgen Skogstad on 08/01/01 08:33 AM

I agree with Dan. The CMS is far from ideal, but for some strange reason (!) it works for simple publishing schemes. Surely things could have been done better .. and it took me quite a while to get "friendly" with the code and so forth, but that's just the way it is.

One thing is for sure; the OpenACS effort _has_ to have a CMS and I guess doing a straight port is the first step on the road to a better one. During the porting stage I guess we really should be looking into other cms products and try to set up a feature sheet .. and try to work out the way we want to implement the "final" OpenACS cms platform.

.. but I think we would have a valuable exercise porting the original cms to OpenACS.

I guess we need something like a project tracker when we get an engeneering team up and running. ;)

A decent effort for a CMS is emerging here in Norway these days; Ez. It is based on Apache, php and very modularized. Perhaps a scheme/model to look into for input.

I for one would also be interested in porting several of the other modules readily available for the acs system .. I have to set up some OpenACS systems before I can get active.. and just have to get these two project up to speed before doing so.

All of you have a real nice day at least!!

Kindest,
Jørgen Skogstad