Thanks for the clarification. I blindly assumed that some sort of CMS was at play behind the scenes, because of well-integrated most of the university’s sites looked. (And how they all had proper layouts using CSS)

Come to think of it, the CMS-as-a-process (and not as a software package) may be the closest to an ideal solution for such a big and fractured organization such as a university. Unlike most large corporations, universities tend to be split along their faculty and department lines, with the leaders of each pushing for different solutions and often fighting with each other over funding, etc.

This is why CMS software can be difficult to implement university-wide. Thus, I can understand your position; plus the freedom for the specialty web apps you’ve developed might be compromised.

Here at Queens there’s been some resistance to the initial rollout of the Apache Lenya, which has only taken place on the ECE sites. Many of my instructors/professors have complained about the “lack of freedom” in placing content on the site when using the CMS. For example, the sidebar of links is omnipresent, and many people don’t like it. (See here for an example.)

I’m hoping that they’re expressing their feedback to the web development team at Queens. I’d hate to see something implemented that the majority of content-contributing users don’t like to use.

Just tracked down this post through technorati

So you know, University of Waterloo does not use a CMS in the *classic* sense. What I did was to design an easy to use XHTML template and CSS that people can customize. I stuck it into a Dreamweaver Template and made it so Contribute users could easily edit content. Our IT department helped spread the use of the template by offering courses and its use was mandated by our Web Steering Committee.

The CMS is not any software but a process… we could probably now adopt a CMS software package with a lot less pain than two years ago but that would risk breaking an awful lot of links all at once unless it is done a bit differently. I am not sure we will ever do that… not with the success of specialty apps we have developed.

Jesse

I’ll admit I have some work to do when it comes to accessibility, but since I am not a public institution nor a company, there is less pressure - but this doesn’t mean I shouldn’t apply good practices for accessibility to this site. In particular, I’m currently looking at Section 508 standards, a US government standard that seems to be fairly well-adopted among websites. But being a public institution definitely subjects the website to more stringent requirements, including wider browser support (even for the older, less used versions) and accessibility.

The availability of easy to use editors in CMSs is also a big boon to content and web publishing. The bare reality is that most people do not care for XHTML, standards, semantics or anything of that sort - and why should they? Don’t get me wrong; I think those topics are of vast importance. But just as I don’t think journalists should have to know the exact details of the newspaper production process, neither should every web content-creator. I know that’s a contrived example, but it illustrates my point.

The good news that is many editors now have the ability to produce clean, standards-based markup from an interface that most people can use. TinyMCE is a good example, and is used in WordPress and can be used in Drupal as well. It has improved a lot since its inception, and its layout/look can be completely customized to provide a minimum of styling to a plethora of options, all while maintaining an interface that resembles a word-processor.