A Simple Case of Content Management

When people think of content management, initially they think of blog posts and calendar entries and schemes for keeping the content current.

That's what you'd expect any system to deliver. But what I've found, once you get beyond that point, is that the kinds of problems you routinely have to deal with often require customization. And that's a good thing!

I'll give you an example.

In Registration (my other job) we need a way to get students back into the system after they (usually mistakenly) drop all classes for the semester. All that's required is their name, student ID and the semester when they want this to happen. The Registration people call this 'reinstatement'.

Anyway, it's about as simple a set of requirements as you can get. The student fills out a brief form, the form data goes into a page that only certain staff have access to and, just to be extra careful, a copy of the results is also sent to the person who normally handles these requests.

Sound easy?

Depending on your CMS, this can either be a breeze or a nightmare. Drupal, I'm happy to say, can handle this out of the box -- not as the result of some awful API that only a programmer can understand -- but as part of its default feature set that anyone with good administrative skills can master.

Now maybe other CMS's can do the same. I certainly hope so. But the moral of the story is that I get requests like this all the time. It's to be expected, encouraged even, because content management isn't just about blogs and calendar entries but about solving the particular needs of the particular department where you happen to work.

Librarians for example have all sorts of strange and exotic content types -- things like 'citation' and 'resource listing'.

As I told people at both programs where I helped out this year at ALA (Drupal BoF & BIGWIG), if you're going to work with things like citations and resource listings, you might as well make sure that the CMS you're getting is flexible and robust enough to handle them -- in as easy and accessible a way possible.

That's the true 'power and glory' of content management. In my view, it's pretty much a basic requirement.

'Buy American' - A Dirty Word?

Since when did 'Buy American' become a dirty word? This editorial by the New York Times has to be the dumbest ever.

Arrogance of the White Collar

Robert Reich has a problem with manufacturing. At least he does when it's practiced in the U.S. For some reason, he thinks that actually making things has gone the way of the horse buggy and 45rpm record player.

It's not a new argument. We heard it all the time during the Clinton Administration. The problem is, the people promoting it could never come up with an alternative that wasn't some form of temporary bubble.

America still needs its washing machines and flat panel displays and we can't pay for them with CDO's and IPO's.

Reich seems to think that increases in productivity and greater automation are something new. This is America. We invented the assembly line. We've always had innovation -- only until now we never used it as an excuse to move our operations off-shore.

He talks about "Technophobes, neo-Luddites and anti-globalist" and warns against being on the 'wrong side of history'.

We've been living on his side of history for twenty years or more and all we have to show for it are vast areas of devastation as entire industries move off-shore.