Lots of good info here, thanks.
You don't say what this app is supposed to do, and that might influence your decision. [...] If you are going to provide services that are on your website, it likely makes little sense to build apps.
That's the idea: make our stuff available through phones. And I agree, an app makes little sense. Sadly, it's not my choice to make -- that decision was made further up the chain of command, without consulting me.
Your website looks homegrown [...] you might consider Drupal or WordPress ...
Ye gods, I wish it were homegrown. I'd have done a better job of it. Or rather, I'd have done it in Drupal, which I worked with for years at a different institution, including developing custom themes and modules. Drupal's a solid system. I miss it.
But no, we're stuck in a poor excuse for a CMS called "OmniUpdate", which is written in an unholy mixture of XSLT and Cold Fusion. It was selected by the marketing department, is mandated across the campus, and makes my job way harder than it has to be. OmniUpdate is damage to work around, not a system to work with.
I've done the best I can with it, but there are limits. In theory, an OmniUpdate site can be made responsive -- but in this case, that means making the entire campus web infrastructure responsive, because we share a common template with the entire university. That's a good idea which probably needs to happen, but also a MASSIVE undertaking -- largely because it rapidly gets into some fairly heated campus politics.
So in the meantime, I'm going to do research on this and put together a project prospectus laying out the possible approaches and challenges, to see if my bosses really want me to do this. If the really do, it'll probably eat all of my time and then some for the foreseeable future.
Will Martin
