tfnico's blog

Coming up is the last week of work for me before the summer, and as last weeks go, I'll probably be too busy to blog about anything interesting. But I'd like to brag that my entire month of July will be spent mostly offline, doing nothing but enjoying the summer in our family's summer-place, as well as digesting the WebWork- and AJAX in Action books. I'm changing employer across the summer, and these technologies are probably the ones I'll be working with at the new place. Have a nice summer, everyone!

Last monday I finally presented my thesis "The Use of Open Source and Open Standards in Web Content Management Systems". Present were my student guide, a small gang of friends and colleagues, and the external examinator who was there by way of tele-conference (or Skype as it's called these days). The presentation went fairly well, but as the examinator had audio communication only (as well as a copy of my slides), my entire theatrical focus was inside the monitor of my laptop. So the people present in the room weren't really too flabbergasted by the presentation, but the examinator liked it and that's what counts. I got some flame for not having spent too much energy on the academic method, but overall he meant it was a great thesis. So that's the official end of my 17 year long education! Anyhow, here's another snippet about the reason we developed WCMS-es in the first place: Web Content Challenges The concept of content in itself seeks to so...

An interesting way to portrait what a WCMS is, is by saying what it is not. I tried to do this in my thesis, but ended up with too many WCMS-sisters that either Can be part of the WCMS Can have WCMS bundled inside Is part of the WCM process, or Depending on definition, is a WCMS So I couldn't really say "This is what WCMS is not:", but ended up with the WCMS alternatives (not really a good title, methinks, but still I think the section helps to explain the WCMS): To further explain web content management, one can consider what other web content tools and management systems are used today , and what separates these from full WCM systems [Byrne, 2001], [Junco, 2004]. The definitions in use are not clear, and some vendors flag functionality which goes beyond their product. To avoid confusion, these are some of the product families which most often are mixed with the WCMS. File system There are various servers or director...

I usually don't like meta-blogging (blogging about the concept of blogs), because a lot of other people do it . But today John Udell raised an interesting example of interaction between (in lack of a better general term) enthusiasts as a result of the openness of the web (all the web2.0 thingies like blogs and podcasts, their links, comments and trackbacks). This reminded me of that I dared to write "I've experimented with the use of a blog as an online research tool" in the Method-chapter in my thesis, and continued: While it lacks structure and rigorousness of this thesis, the blog is still chronological through time, and in a way, it represents the research in a more honest way. It also performs the role of a dynamic research tool, as updated resources are available through my blogroll and linkroll. Kristin Helen was the fellow-CMS enthusiast that opened my eyes for getting away with this (by pointing me to this document (1), and now she has in fact publishe...

jmettraux noted that Alex Popescu is the technological architect of the new InfoQ developer community site and suggests that it is running on Magnolia . If this is the case, it is one excellent reference site for the Magnolia project. Alex commented that he will be writing about the architecture in some coming articles, but I can't wait with taking a few guesses. I think it's a mash-up of different systems (seeing they're gonna use Jive for forums). There's not a uniform url-pattern on the links. One .jsp, one .html, some .action (although this need not mean anything ) The .action urls are very WebWork'ish, but could of course be JSF (event oriented). The use of DWR points towards no web framework in particular. Alex has also made a comment supporting the notion of WebWork/Struts Ti. On the other hand, the Magnolia developers are moving towards JSF/Facelets/Freemarker. The infoq.com/.magnolia is forbidden , so there is definetly some Magnolia stuff going on h...

Seth Gottlieb wrote a good post on Email and Content Management I never miss the opportunity to evangelize the use of our KM-tools instead of e-mail (and sometimes even verbal contact). Some effective techniques I used at work: * Refuse to do any task colleagues sent me by email, insisting that they issue a ticket in our task-tracker instead. * Never reply with informative emails. Rather write a wiki-page on the subject and send the link to the correspondents. * Each time a colleague seeks to explain how something works, or teach me something, I insist that they write a wiki-page instead, and send me the link. We shouldn't abandon email. It's a quick and responsive tool that creates alot of dialog and content productivity. KM-people know that face-to-face meetings is the best way to convey knowledge. Phone, instant messaging and even email are closer to face-to-face than a CMS. Any company should have set conventions of how different collaboration tools are used. Here are some ...

(Stupid blogger/writeley. Blog publish still not working .) Apoorv's post reminded me of the extensibility requirements of a WCMS. While his approach seems to be a more pragmatic find-requirements-and-select-best-solution, I prefer the generic but extensible solutions (probably because I'm a developer/programmer at heart). Apoorv also differentiates between customization and extension, but I find it hard to draw a clear line between these two. Here's some lines on extensibility from my thesis: The final and most important requirement of the WCMS stems from a single principle. It is impossible to predefine all requirements for a WCMS. Each year new concepts, ideas and methods are introduced to the World Wide Web, and web-sites must change the way they deliver content, content managers must change the way they produce content, and developers must change the WCMS to allow the requisite changes. We propose that extensibility is the most important requirement of WCMS, beca...

Interesting application. http://www.google.com/trends?q=cms%2C+content+management&ctab=2&geo=all&date=all It seems that most searches are done on google.dk, which is a bit surprising (lotsa Danes on the CMS-scene, but they're still a small country). Also somewhat worrying that the graph for content management is steadily sinking. We need more hype :)

Having delivered the thesis, I've figured out how I'm going to use this blog. I'm going to continue posting here, writing about web content management, but also about software development in general and other stuff. But the first thing I want to note down are my thoughts on how it was to write the thesis, sharing some writing tips with you. Writing English My first advice is: Don't . Unless its your native language, of course. I have had the pleasure of a bi-lingual upbringing, and seeing the English of many other Norwegians, I'm sorry to that generally, Norwegians write lousy English. Its not that we make grammatical or syntactical errors, but the feeling of the sentence is just.. wrong. And don't be fooled: Word or any other another spell-checker is not good enough. I've gone over another thesis which was already "fixed" by Word, and I still managed to empty a red-ink pen in the process. Another point is that you don't *think* in En...

Righto, April month is closing in fast, and the weight of the current thesis is that most of the stuff which is gonna be delivered is still inside my head, while a minority of it is written into thesis.odt. So for the next month I'm gonna pretty much lock myself inside the closet with a laptop and get the page count up. So there will be very little IM-chatting, programming, partying, social life, and least of all, blogging. The next post will appear soon after I have delivered the thesis, 2nd of May. After that I can officially declare this blog complete :)

I'm not really happy with the outline of the requirements I've put up so far, but as it goes when you're trying to improve your own writing, I've gone blind as to how I can improve it. I've divided the requirements into 4 parts: Content life cycle (how the content goes from draft to published, archived and deleted) Management (administration, workflow) Globalization (internationalization and localization) Content delivery (templating, syndication, search, feedback from content consumers (as in comments)) Not extendability, but extensibility (modification, customization) Don't really know how I ended up with those parts, but I think I started off with a long list of 10-15 smaller requirements, then tried to knot them together like that. The last one is the most important one in my eyes. Regular readers might have noted some connection here in how the OS-compliance will pay off in higher extensibility. How? W...

Now this is a real WCMS! A system developed totally in-house to put together hundreds of thousands of pages, one hundred content managers (personell). Really interesting to see how it works. Java-based of course (at least the client). Interesting server architecture, semi-technical. Focus on information architecture. Lotsa meta-data and XML talk-and-do. Still, the client looks no fancier than the one we developed for Primetime Portal. Funny how the IBM website has. in spite of efforts such as this, always been quite crappy. Probably due to the overload of content that has to be dragged around with everything. Still alotta useful stuff in that article I can use.

Introduces some light technical factors. First some nice social requirements. Cultural stuff, discusses the language/country challenge. Content is enabled further through translation, but I think this paper is a bit too.. ideal. In a small- or medium sized business, you have a local audience, or you have an international (and thereby English) audience. Internationalization is a hassle to develop and even worse to maintain. Do no bother if you do not really have to.

Interesting article doing an early review of open source projects in the library system (ILS) world. Uses a framework called Development Arena (DA) for comparing projects. A DA seems to be a context description using ANT'y terms. Very flash, but I'll try to restrain myself from using ANT in the thesis. Some good points in the article anyway. Conclusion is that "the presence of mature commercial softwatre results in limited interest and support for F/OSS options". Would be interesting to hear if this has changed since... uh.. 17th of May, 2005.

This piece by Steve Goodwin and Richard Vidgen is written in 2002 and proves to be a quite nice and quick introduction to the processes of WCM. It seems the term WCM was hyped a bit more than today those years ago, but still these guys have a view of WCM pretty similar to mine. After the very good intro, they produce a framework (more like the typical aspects of WCM, and which problems they sought to solve, like workflow and meta-data) , then procede to elaborate a bit on a real WCMS-effort which failed to some extent (like all greate software projects do). Some nice focus on XML or RDF, interestingly enough with a focus on using UML to model the markup. The article merely scraps the surface of WCM, but does it well in 8 pages.