Web Redesign Weekly Update – 4 February 2010

All,

Wow-the piloting phase of the project starts next week!  First and foremost, thanks to everyone for volunteering to be part of the pilot – see the 1^st “questions from the field”  addressed below on how we will select any additional users.  Also, thanks to everyone for resubmitting their comments and concerns – I think we have them all. 

Have a great week!

John

 

College Consolidation Planning for the Web Redesign

The team has discussed the college mergers (College of Arts & Letters with the College of Education & Human Development and College of Social & Behavioral Sciences with the School of Social Work & Human Services) with changes effective July 1^st and our web redesign options:  1) continue with plans to migrate all six colleges separately and consolidate later, or 2) consolidate the colleges for go-live.   We will be meeting with the affected colleges in the next few weeks to present our findings and get their inputs, determine what the schedule/resource impacts will be, etc.

 

QUESTIONS FROM THE FIELD

 

Q:  Can you tell me what some of the evaluation criteria are to be a part of the pilot program?

A:  For the pilot criteria, we’re generally looking for non-competing/functionally-unique candidates to complement the initial pilot organizations, Undergraduate Admissions and the College of Science, Health and Engineering (a breadth versus depth approach); however, we may be able to include similar departments/functional areas in the pilot if time permits – stay tuned…

 

Q:  I think it’s odd that the two most used links by students and faculty – EagleNET and Blackboard – are obscurely buried at the bottom of the new home page.  Why aren’t they featured as prominent buttons near the top of the page?

A:  When evaluating the public facing site our focus has to be audience, audience, audience. Our primary audience for this site is external to EWU with a large emphasis on prospective students.  With that said, we recognize that it’s extremely important to accommodate visits from internal audiences such as students, faculty and staff on our public facing site. This is why links relevant to those audiences will be located in:

- global audience-based navigation (Links like “Blackboard”, “EagleNET” and “Library” will likely be featured in all four of the audience-based drop-down menus, which effectively quadruples the placement of those links and puts them at the very top of every external page),

- global footer navigation, and

- the resources page.

These types of links will also have a prominent presence on our intranet/portal solution.

Q:  There seems to be a presumption of all web developers/designers that everyone uses a broadband connection to surf the Interweb,  and that seems true here at EWU.  Too many pages are bloated with graphics and animations.  Please provide a low bandwidth version of the new web pages, without the flash video, etc.  Many, if not most, students would benefit from that option.

A:  Done!  Visitors with low-speed connections will have the option to choose the text-only version of the web site (see the upper-right corner of the redesign site).  An interesting note here is that the text-only feature exists for ADA-compliance–not performance reasons, and here’s why (ALERT:  plug for Google Analytics follows!):  Between Sept. 1, 2009 and Feb.1, 2010, Google reported that ewu.edu received 1,437,896 total visits from an external audience. Of those visits, only 25,296 were from a dial-up connection, or roughly 1.76% of the total visitors to the site.    Now, since ewu.edu is for anyone interested in any aspect of EWU, we also looked at sites that target our biggest audience for the new external site, mainly prospective students, and had comparable results.   For example, when you look at the analytics info for the startsomethingbig.org’s site between March 1, 2008 and Feb. 1, 2010, Google reported that there were 6,005 total visits. Of those visits, only 81 were from a dial-up connection, or 1.3% of the total visitors.  (See my 13 January email for more information on Google Analytics, or go to http://www.google.com/analytics/index.html to learn more)

WEB FEATURE OF THE WEEK:  Web 2.0 Technologies – What are they?

Web 2.0 technologies “allow its users to interact with other users…, in contrast to non-interactive websites where users are limited to the passive viewing of information that is provided to them.  Examples of Web 2.0 include web-based communities, hosted services, web applications, social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups, and folksonomies.”—Wikipedia.   The EWU web redesign has incorporated a number of these web 2.0 technologies to give our audiences an interactive, state-of-the-art web experience they expect and deserve. (Want to see EWU’s presence on popular social networking sites?  Go to http://www.ewu.edu/x66982.xml )

RESOURCES

Redesign website URL:  http://redesign.ewu.edu/  (Please note that this is a staging area and may be subject to unannounced maintenance and changes. There will also be a lot of un-styled and completely made-up content while new pages are being built out.  Also, you must access the site through the EWU network)

Questions or concerns for the web team? Email to EWUWebTeam@SharePointes.ewu.edu – we’d love to hear from you!

Web Redesign Weekly Update – 28 January 2010

All,

 Here’s a quick update on our progress – the project team’s been working hard getting ready for the pilot phase starting February 8^th.   

Have a great week!

 John

 PLEASE VERIFY WE RECEIVED YOUR EMAIL!

We recently had problems with the email account EWUWebTeam@SharePointes.ewu.edu where some of your emails may not have been received.  We’re confident the problem has been resolved; however, please review the list of emails below to see if we received yours – if it is missing, please resubmit and courtesy copy me at jkissack@ewu.edu – I apologize for the inconvenience!

SUBJECT

Web Redesign update request - Simmelink, Dana, Auxiliary and Business Services

Access to Intranet Content from distant EWU programs – Amy Ouellette

Increasing visibility of the library’s link – Doris Munson

Request that the drop down for graduate programs remain on the main page – Kristi Duenas

Invitation to speak to Directors re: website development – Karen Marsh

Honors Request to be part of the pilot – Mary Benham

EWU Web Redesign ADA-compliance – Terrie Ashby-Scott

Associated Students of EWU Web Site Question regarding Ingeniux CMS – Justin Terry

Library CMS page meeting – Doris Munson

MBA piloting – (BLANK)

Same content for internal and external audiences – How is it handled? – Bruce DeFrates

Pilot testing volunteer, Graduate Admissions – Kristi Duenas

Web Redesign Change Request and Advancement Briefing Request  – Mike Westfall

The Music Department  (mac computers) would like to be part of the pilot – Erin Foster

Will you provide help for content conversion? – Bamby Fields

PRESIDENT’S COLLEGE CONSOLIDATION ANNOUNCEMENT

You probably saw the president’s merger announcement (College of Arts & Letters with the College of Education & Human Development and College of Social & Behavioral Sciences with the School of Social Work & Human Services) with changes effective July 1^st.  You’re also probably wondering how the mergers are going to impact the web redesign, if at all…good question!  Basically, the choice is simple:  1) continue with plans to migrate all six colleges separately and consolidate later, or 2) consolidate the colleges for go-live.  The team will discuss our options (pros and cons) at tomorrow’s web meeting and I will forward our findings to this group for review – more to follow…

WEB FEATURE OF THE WEEK: WordPress Blog

The new website will have a blog capability for approved EWU community members, and our technical team is in the final stages of implementing the WordPress blogging solution.  Want to learn more about the features that will be available? Go to  http://en.wordpress.com/features/ for more!

RESOURCES

Redesign website URL:  http://redesign.ewu.edu/  (Please note that this is a staging area and may be subject to unannounced maintenance and changes. There will also be a lot of un-styled and completely made-up content while new pages are being built out.  Also, you must access the site through the EWU network)

Web Redesign Weekly Update – 13 January 2010

All,

Hopefully, you’ve had a chance to peruse the EWU web redesign http://redesign.ewu.edu/ and are as impressed as I am with the project team’s hard work!

Below are our answers to questions we’ve received over the past week. As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please shoot us an email at EWUWebTeam@SharePointes.ewu.edu – we’d love to hear from you!

Finally, thanks to everyone that volunteered for the pilot phase of the project. The project team will evaluate each request and you will be hearing back from us soon.

Have a great week!

John

QUESTIONS FROM THE FIELD

Q: We have lots of web content…will we get help moving our content?
A: Yes! We are working to get dedicated project personnel to assist in migrating content – stay tuned for more details…

Q: We have the same content for our internal and external audiences – How is it handled so that we don’t have duplication?
A: In general, if the content is for both external and internal audiences, it would normally go on the external site (obviously there are exceptions that would require duplicate content, but they should be minimal). However, this statement does not give the “green light” to place all content into the external site! Remember, the primary audiences for the new external web site are people outside the EWU community; therefore, the site’s content should be high-level and “brochure-like”. We will be providing guidelines and training for determining external versus internal content soon. Great question!

Q: Will the new site be ADA compliant?
A: Yes, the site will be ADA compliant and we have been working with EWU Disability Support Services on this very important issue. Kit Frantzich (kfrantzich@ewu.edu )is overseeing the site’s ADA compliance and can answer any questions or concerns you may have.

WEB FEATURE OF THE WEEK: Google Analytics
Ever wanted to know how many people visit your web page(s)? When and from where are they visiting? Do they ever come back? To answer these crucial questions and more, the web redesign has incorporated Google Analytics, a powerful tool that provides you “rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness”. Want to learn more? Visit the Google analytics main site: http://www.google.com/analytics/index.html . It includes a good overview video (click on Product Tour). Also, under the Education Tab there are some good instructional videos: http://www.youtube.com/googleanalytics?hl=en , especially Beginning Analytics http://www.youtube.com/profile?v=_qfG2d9etvk&user=googleanalytics&hl=en . Enjoy!

EWU Web Redesign Project Update – 6 January 2010

Greetings and happy new year!

I would like to take this opportunity to introduce myself and the project team, as well as give you an update on the EWU web redesign effort. My goal is to keep everyone involved “in the loop”, and this is the first of many recurring EWU Web redesign project updates you will receive.

The project team has made great strides implementing the new EWU website and we are on track to go live by the end of the Spring 2010 quarter. Want a sneak peek? Go to http://redesign.ewu.edu/ (Please note that this is a staging area and may be subject to unannounced maintenance and changes. There will also be a lot of un-styled and completely made-up content while new pages are being built out. Also, you must access the site through the EWU network)

Because you are our most important resource for the success of this project, we want to bring you up to date about where we are now, and what you can expect in the coming months so that you can begin to plan!

What’s next?

28 Dec 2009 – 5 Feb 2010: Training docs/internal testing
08 Feb – 05 Mar 2010: Piloting and testing (CSHE and Admissions*)
08 Mar – 28 May 2010: Training and Content Conversion/ Library Development
31 May 2010: GO-LIVE!

*Want your area to be considered for the pilot? Send us your request to EWUWebTeam@SharePointes.ewu.edu

How will I keep informed?

We will communicate upcoming project issues via email, the ewuweb listserv and the Web Redesign blog (http://ewuweb.wordpress.com/ ) regarding:
• Training opportunities and support availability
• Expectations, priorities and migration schedule
• Workshops targeting specific groups
• The new division of external and internal content, how to prepare
• Project status reports
• Site governance and best practice information such as
o Writing for the web
o Style guide
o 508 Compliance

How do I contact the Project Team? (Please email general project questions and comments to: EWUWebTeam@SharePointes.ewu.edu )

John Kissack Project Manager jkissack@ewu.edu 359-6205
Betsy Knox CMS User Access and Support Manager bknox@ewu.edu 359-6880
Bergen Muzatko Training & Development Consultant bmuzatko@ewu.edu 359-2393
Colin Turnbull Web Technical Lead cturnbull@ewu.edu 359-4985
Kit Frantzich Web Developer kfrantzich@ewu.edu 359-7479
Sam Buzby Web Designer sbuzby@ewu.edu 359-4027

What should I be doing now?

Knowing that EWU’s web presence is its most visible marketing tool, our goal is to focus our external, public facing website on student recruitment through the use of multimedia, social networking and an appealing new design.

While there are many reasons our current website is difficult to navigate, a major factor is the sheer volume of content it contains. An important part of this project will be the migration of internal content–information geared toward current students, faculty and staff–into an INTRANET location. This separation of content will enable us to simplify navigation within our public facing website and provide content especially suited to an external audience of potential students, parents and high school counselors. So, with that in mind…

1. Think about your content:
o Identify your content for an external audience (future students, parents, high-school counselors)
o Identify your content for an internal audience (current students, faculty, staff)
o Is your content current? Are documents ( PDF & Word documents), linked to your site up-to-date?

2. Help ensure that those in your area who are involved in determining web content are members of the web listserv and will be receiving important updates. Those who would like to receive project related email can subscribe themselves to the listserv (or Betsy will subscribe them if their email is sent to bknox@ewu.edu). Any interested parties may subscribe.

For more information about the ewuweb listserv and how to join or unsubscribe:

http://www.ewu.edu/ewuweb

3. Don’t stress …. We will keep you informed and provide the necessary training and support.

That’s it for now – we look forward to working with all of you on this extremely important initiative!

The Staging Area

I know, amazing… we’re still here. A lot has changed since the last posts nearly six months ago. We (within IT) have seen some some big changes within our organization and even bigger changes regarding IT projects. Lots of exciting stuff so I hope that it all gets showcased for the campus community soon. I digress…

I wanted to take this opportunity to firstly, let you know we’re still here and making progress on the project and secondly, invite those on-campus to visit the staging area where the site will be built out into a “go-live” state. Access is currently restricted to the EWU campus network because the environment isn’t ready for public consumption and I really don’t want search engines crawling this area…if anyone really needs access and you can’t be on the EWU network, please contact me directly and we’ll work something out. The staging area can be seen by visiting http://redesign.ewu.edu. Please note that this is a staging area and may be subject to unannounced maintenance and changes. There will also be a lot of unstyled and completely made-up content while new pages are being built out.

A few facts about the staging environment:

• Everything you see is published through the Ingeniux CMS Version 6
• “Structured URLs” are being used instead of x numbers
• Nginx (“Engine-X”) is being used for both load balancing and serving static content. I could write a whole post on why nginx is cool but that would bore most of you so if you’re interested, check it out here: http://wiki.nginx.org/Main.
• Yslow rules are mostly implemented but there’s still work to be done

Please feel free to leave comments or questions!

does size matter?

In a design meeting a question was raised about the overall width of Eastern’s proposed new site design. The concern was that the proposed width of 980 pixels might be a little too wide. I must admit that in my own struggle to define a new layout and style for EWU’s Web presence (and, admittedly, in my utter hatred for the current site’s outdated 800×600 dimensional compliance) I neglected to consider the seemingly few individuals who might still prefer a skinny site. In a perfect world, we’d all have gloriously huge monitors, dual-monitors in fact… and of course we’d all be on Macs — or at least Linux (for Colin) — and the world would be a far better place. But I digress…

One good place to start in the search for something to back up the currently proposed width should be the Google Analytics data we’ve been collecting from Eastern’s new admissions-oriented microsite, startsomethingbig.org, which launched almost a year ago. The audience for this site is in many ways the same as the audience we want to aim Eastern’s redesigned site towards.

The screen resolution analytics collected shows us that the largest portion of our audience, nearly 30 percent, use a screen resolution of 1024×768. The redesigned site would show up fine at this resolution as long as the browser window is maximized. The only drawback would be that any side-background texture or imagery we use would not really be seen (which is usually built for those with larger monitors to take up some of that unused space anyway).

The second largest group (just over 20 percent) use a screen resolution of 1280×800, more than enough space to accommodate a 980 pixels-wide site with some bonus space left over for side-background imagery. The next most popular resolutions (1280×1024, 1680×1050, 1440×900, 1920×1200, 1280×768 etc.) account for more than 47.5 percent of our audience, all of which would beautifully display the newly redesigned site. This leaves us with less than 2.5 percent of our audience still using a screen resolution of 960×720, 800×600 or less.

Another good gauge for our audience and our industry’s take on this matter comes from looking at the widths of some other education sites, as well as some of the most popular and widely-used sites on the Web. Check out this nifty site width chart I created after looking at 17 other sites to see what they had already come up with. You’ll see that CWU is the most daring, with a homepage width of 1200 pixels. Both Virginia Tech and Amazon.com already use the same width we’re proposing, 980 pixels, while Facebook, Stanford, MySpace, Gonzaga, WSU and Appalachian all come in right around 960 pixels. (Maybe shaving off 10 pixels on each side of our layout would put us in a better range afterall.)

The rest (Biola, UW, Whitworth, CCS, our current site and WWU) all still appear to be trying to make the 2.5 percent happy. Fine for them, but I think our research shows that it’s going to be better to design to the future and get as much shelf life out of the new design as possible. That being said, there is a third option, an idea that comes from Yahoo!’s homepage that actually allows users to choose a more narrow layout if they prefer. Maybe this would be the best compromise for a site like ours that has to please so many people, but I’ll leave that little jewel up to Colin to figure out if it’s a CMS possibility. I did however just notice that Yahoo! seems to have a website redesign of their own in the works, and the new version eliminates the page width options. Oh well.

One for the techies: Performance using Yslow

One of the side affects of developing a more robust, interactive and aesthetically pleasing website is the possibility of an adverse performance impact.  When considering all of our potential audiences, it’s very important that we try to maximize the performance of EWU’s future site. One of the ways we are doing this is by following some performance rules, called “YSlow”, developed by the performance gurus at Yahoo!. I need to credit Ryan for bringing YSlow to my attention back when he first started here. Since being introduced to it I’ve been on the verge of obsessing over how we can make the new site faster.

So what is YSlow? YSlow is a set of 13 rules that affect the performace of a web page. Following the rules can lead to performance improvements of 25-50%. That’s a major improvement especially considering the rules are quite simple:

1. Make Fewer HTTP Requests
2. Use a Content Delivery Network
3. Add an Expires Header
4. Gzip Components
5. Put CSS at the Top
6. Move Scripts to the Bottom
7. Avoid CSS Expressions
8. Make JavaScript and CSS External
9. Reduce DNS Lookups
10. Minify JavaScript
11. Avoid Redirects
12. Remove Duplicate Scripts
13. Configure ETags

I’m not going to expand on each rule here but I’ve linked to the explanation for each rule on Yahoo’s site if you’re interested. With the possible exception of rule 2, using  a CDN, we will be attempting to follow each of these basic rules when developing and deploying the new site.

Measuring page performance using YSlow has been made easy by means of a couple Firefox plugins. Yahoo has developed a Firefox plug-in for YSlow to use with the Firebug plugin (a must-have plug-in for web developers). The YSlow plug-in analyzes web page performance with respect to each of the 13 rules and then assigns a performace grade of A through F.

If these rules have the positive performance impact that we expect, my hope would be that we can apply the same rules to other web-based IT systems around campus.

Site map meeting coming your way

We’ve built a site map for the redesign using mindmeister.com. The goal behind the map is to represent how we propose reorganizing information on the new site so that it is more user friendly. So, the map doesn’t necessarily represent the back end architecture of the site, but it does represent what navigational options a user will be presented with at any given point. Now, in case you didn’t notice, there is a TON of information on the EWU website. Therefore we have undoubtedly missed some things on the map or – this may be hard to believe – even placed some things where they shouldn’t go. For this reason, we have grouped together areas of the map into several meetings with departments and colleges over the next three weeks (the first meeting was today with “Future Students”).

Below is a list of the meetings/groups and the lead staff member for each group. If you are a CMS web publisher or web developer for your area, please contact the lead staff member’s office to find out if you should attend.

• Future students (Admissions, Financial Aid, Registrar and more): Larry Briggs
• Current students (Student Affairs, Residential Life, Student Activities and more): Al Thompson
• Graduate Studies: Ron Dalla and Brian Donahue
• Academic resources (Academic Affairs, Academic Resources and more): Linda Kieffer
• DIEO: Doreen Timm
• Support EWU (Alumni, Development): Mike Westfall
• EWU Libraries: Dean Pat Kelley
• We’ll meet with all EWU Colleges individually, with the dean being the lead for each

In the meetings, we’ll focus on the following for each area:

• Goals for web pages
• Input and suggestions for site map
• What is your content wish list? What content can be removed? What new content do you need?
• Personnel resources for completing web pages

Most of these meetings will be led by either Michelle Hege or Lisa Cargill from Desautel Hege Communications. They will act as an extension of our staff to gather your input and report back to us. With this information, we can complete the site map. As this process is going on, the MarCom and IT staffs are working together to create all the new page types we’ll need in the new site. In addition, we are starting the programming work involved in building the new home page and navigation.

Once we complete the site map meetings, we should be at a point where we can start building the new site map into the CMS.

Web Manager, Where Art Thou?

As many of you know by now, our web manager in Marketing and Communications, Ryan Bentz, had to leave us. Sorry I’m a bit late in formal notification via this blog. Those of you who had the opportunity to work with Ryan and see his work know he was a very skilled developer, great communicator and a flat out excellent person to work with. He did a great job for us, helped us make great progress and he’ll be missed. While Ryan liked his job here and embraced our Eagle spirit, personal reasons forced his move back to Seattle where he’s found a new position doing none other than managing a website for an international company.

The good news here is that we have a solid, three-part plan for moving forward. (1) Thanks to Dr. Arevalo and our University leadership, we were granted the ability to replace Ryan. The application period closes this Friday (10/24) and we hope to start interviews late next week. (2) Again, thanks to recognition of the importance of this project, we were granted the ability to contract with Ryan to complete the site map and important pieces of programming work for the new site. (3) We are continuing our partnership with Desautel Hege Communications. They will act as an extention of our staff in conducting meetings with departments and colleges across the University to discuss the proposed site map (more on this in my next entry).

So, while Ryan will be missed, it is onward and upward with the redesign.

Ingeniux CMS Version 6

Throughout the redesign process we have been getting a lot of questions about the CMS. As you may know, the “redesign” is a bit more than a site redesign because we are also moving to a new version of the Ingneiux CMS. The transition to a new CMS is a bit more than an upgrade…”reimplementation” might be a better term. The new version, Ingeniux CMS version 6, contains many new features that should greatly improve the user experience and aide us in the development of the new site. I’ll run down some of the new key features in my personal excitement order:

AJAX Web Client: Cross-browser, zero-install client based on the latest AJAX technology, runs on Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Apple Safari.

Say goodbye to ActiveX controls and good riddance to the Mac Client! In the new version there’s nothing to install, no separate versions for PC and Mac; just bring up the CMS in your favorite browser and off you go. Although Ingeniux lists Firefox, IE and Safari as their supported browsers, I have tested version 6 in a couple other browsers and it worked great (even in Linux for all 2 or 3 of us Linux users).

New WYSIWYG Edit Control: Provides robust content import configuration options, improved support for tables and XHTML compliance

Ingeniux has chosen TinyMCE as the new WYSIWYG editor for version 6. If you aren’t familiar with WYSIWYG editors, TinyMCE is one of the most popular and widely used editors. It’s commonly integrated with other web content management solutions like Mambo, Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. I would estimate that at least 90% of the issues users have with the current version of the CMS are directly related to the editors. I am extremely optimistic that we wont be experiencing any more disappearing content and IGXERROR issues with the new editor in place. Ingeniux has given us numerous configuration options for the new editor which should allow us to tailor it to our needs and better uphold content standards.

Enhanced Asset Management: Improved image and file management, including built-in image processing, group-level permissions and XML metadata support.

Asset management is referring to the management of documents, images and media. The new enhancements will give us an intuitive way manage files directly through the CMS instead of going through the “document server” process. We will be able to upload images, video, and documents directly through the CMS interface and delete those files when need be. All of the folders are secured using group permissions so we don’t have to worry about users managing files in a location that they shouldn’t have access to.

Another huge feature of the enhanced asset management interface is the ability to manipulate images. Currently, we have to use a third-party product like Photoshop to scale down images to a reasonable web-presentation size. Now we have the ability to scale images to size as part of the upload process.

Search Engine Friendly URL enhancements: Auto-generated search engine friendly URLs model site structure and page names

As part of the redesign we are focusing a lot of attention on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This feature of the new CMS should immensely help our SEO effort. The URLs are generated by the naming and positioning of pages within the CMS tree structure. Here’s an example of how the friendly URLs work:

In the above site tree, friendly URLs would build out from from the home page, “EWU Home”. Folders can be used to organize the site tree but do not play into the structure of the URL. If the page name contains a space, the space is replaced by a dash (eg. Site Map would be Site-Map.xml). So the path to “Admissions” would be /Admissions.xml. The paths to “Path1″ and “Path2″ would be /Admissions/Path1.xml and /Admissions/Path2.xml. As you can imagine, page naming will become very important because there’s a definite line between search engine friendly URLs and user friendly URLs. http://www.ewu.edu/apply-for-admission-at-ewu.xml might be search engine friendly (good for SEO) but certainly not very user friendly. An example of an appropriate search engine friendly URL might be when publishing news or blog entries (eg. http://www.ewu.edu/News/ewu-launches-new-website.xml). The friendly URLs feature will be a very nice enhancement to our site but it will be important for users to understand how the URLs are constructed when using the new version of the CMS.

Multi-Format Output: Publish CMS content with any file extension and to any server technology; including Microsoft .NET, PHP, Java Server Pages, and Adobe Cold Fusion.

My mind begins to race when I start thinking of the possibilities using multi-format output. To explain how it works I would direct you back to a diagram I used in a previous post. The diagram showed how content is created using the Ingeniux CMS but specifically how XSL stylesheets can be applied to user supplied data to produce a desired document type. The same method applies here. A user could supply content (via CMS) to be inserted into a page containing a scripting language like PHP (via XSLT).

Hierarchical Taxonomy System: Import, build or manage taxonomies directly in Ingeniux CMS. Categorize content for re-use and then use the Taxonomy Navigation system to return content based on categories, create pivot filters and generate tag clouds

It’s still a bit unclear to me how we will utilize this very powerful feature but it does present us with a lot of options . It gives users the ability to categorize/classify all of their content using a set of pre-defined categories. Taxonomy navigation will likely be used for media (image/video) galleries and possibly to present tag clouds in a couple areas of the site.

Single Sign-On Authentication: Supports cascading authentication to LDAP, Active Directory and SQL data repositories

Admittedly, not too exciting for the average CMS user but its good to note that we will be ready for the Looking Glass project when the project is ready for us.

Well, that was quick overview of some of the key features and enhancements coming in the new version of the CMS. Personally, I’m very pleased with the direction Ingeniux is going with their new products. I think they’ve done an excellent job of filling any shortcomings of previous CMS versions. If you would like more details on any of the new features or have any questions about the CMS, please feel free to leave a comment here or shoot me an email.