Hi,

We're in the process of reviewing the functionality of our corporate CMS, looking at whether we should be improving what we have to better meet our needs or to consider moving to another system.

I've been spending quite a bit of time detailing typical CMS user tasks, trying to remain technology agnostic to help our IT teams make the best possible recommendations for next steps.

One area that I'm struggling with at the moment is site reorganisation and the process of publishing - pushing the content from the CMS to the website itself.

The CMS we have right now is good for editing and republishing existing content so long as the structure doesn't change in a radical way. When editors need to look at pulling part of their website structure apart and putting it back together in a substantially different way (editing some pages, removing some, adding some with new sub sections being created etc.) it's pretty painful.

As a support team we end up needing to work quite closely with colleagues to help them plan through where they're trying to get to, do as much work as possible out of public view and then have a messy couple of hours as they move everything around - some of it impacting on the public website while they're doing it. This process also means it's often hard for them to show managers a preview of where they're heading and the complete picture can't be presented til it's done.

In the (good?) old days pre-CMS we could take a copy of the live site, do what we needed to do on a dev server, then when everything was complete do a switchover.

As I try to outline what would make our current editorial/site management experience better I can't get away from my old HTML way of thinking - move through dev and staging servers to live.

Can anyone outline a way they're happy(ish) with on their CMS?

Thanks, Neil

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Neil Allison

University Website Programme

The University of Edinburgh

0131 650 9513

www.ed.ac.uk/website-programme

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The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.