I'm in the beginning stages of a redesign on the Army's CMS called CORE. I'd be glad to talk to you if you wanted to know my thoughts on CMS.
However. I'm a bit confused as to who you intend CMS to help? Most CMS out there are horrific in many ways. They often are built so a single person can do everything. But are also designed so only someone with a background in that field (design, writing, so on) can really understand them. That has been my experience with WordPress and Joomla, and while not -really- a CMS, Blogger is a great example of how tying up the loose ends on one side creates a terrible mess on the other. (If you haven't played with it, try to make your own template with blogger) What we are trying to do with CORE this time around is to give each kind of user their own interface. And we are also, due to the scale of our user base, trying to get as much cross pollination as possible. If you've ever worked with the government you'll know how hard it is to get stove-piped section A to share anything with stove-piped section B. Our CMS will treat all content somewhat like clipart, and give suggestions. Someone who wrote a story about, say, The Army Navy Game, would see some of the most popular photos uploaded about that game when they go to attach a photo to the article. Among a host of other enhancements to the typical CMS. Such as a reliance on predictive technology to send content to the sections based on context. And an extension to page creation using widgets which are powered by those feeds. And templates created by us and others that aren't built with a template language, but are built with html a single extra tag. This system will go to support everything on Army.mil as well as through a variety of widgets that can be place out on other sites. (internal and external) through an API. So in many ways it is much more than a CMS. But, if you ask me, does the general public's understanding of CMS make them better UX designers? I'd have to say certainly not, if anything that is what we are trying to correct with our redesign. If you ask me, does it make me a better UX designer? I would also say no, because it is through the lens of my prior experience and training that I am about to see what works and what doesn't. Could a CMS be used as a tool to teach, certainly. But so can Word, or Open Office, or Notepad, or Firefox. Anything with good and bad choices you can use for illustration. Perhaps I simply missed your point. I am quite prone to doing that. So feel free to reiterate and call me out as a moron. I'm used to it. :) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=36653 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
