CMS & Drupal
As we mentioned in an earlier post, we expect to build our new site using a Content Management System (CMS) called Drupal. Drupal is a popular, well-supported open-source CMS platform. Part of the discovery phase of the redesign project involves determining how much of our content it makes sense to move into Drupal for version 1.0 of our new website.
Using a CMS requires us to think about how our content should be categorized, grouped and reused across the site. We'll do this by specifying content types and their attributes, and by using taxonomies (content tagging sytems) to further categorize and create relationships between content. Essentially, we're creating a large database of content elements that can be queried and assembled in various ways and presented as web pages.
So what does this mean in terms of the way we, and our users, interact with our site?
Our users won't know the difference--a site built using a CMS will still appear as pages viewed in a browser. But the way we create and work with content will be a bit different.
We will use the Drupal interface to locate pieces of content by content types, and edit them using a Drupal editor. Most web publishers will not need HTML skills to create and maintain content. Once we have migrated all of our content into Drupal, the staging server will no longer be necessary since content can be kept unpublished in Drupal until it is ready to be published. Drupal also tracks changes and versions, making it possible to roll back to previous versions.
While this will all take some initial investment of effort to put in place, moving to a CMS now will position us to associate content in more powerful and dynamic ways in later iterations of our site design.