Unit 2: Case Study in Choosing and Implementing a CMS

I chose to discuss Huttenlock et al.’s article, “Untangling a tangled web: a case study in choosing and implementing a CMS.” The three person Systems and Technological Services department at Wheaton College began experimenting with more complex webpages in the early 2000’s. While they developed an in-house CMS that worked for a short period, in 2003 they decided to use a commercial product.

In order to evaluate the various CMSs, the department developed a rubric. They wanted the CMS to be open source, allow data from the old website to migrate to the new CMS, secure, established (not a first version release), and easy to use from a development and management perspective (Huttenlock et al. 63). I found it pretty amusing that, “many of the products started to look the same. No matter which CMS one chose, one could easily create the same boxy site with approximately the same amount of work” (63). Maybe it’s because we are working on our digital collections more than a decade after Huttenlock et al. looked at CMSs, but I would not say that the various collection management software we have tried in this course creates the same looking sites with the same amount of work. It could also be that the curated introduction to these systems we are receiving in this class already eliminated products that are very similar to one another.

Eventually the folks at Wheaton College decided that a CMS that could use their existing database structure was the best option, so they chose one called WebGUI. Interestingly, WebGUI had not been a frontrunner during the first part of the selection process because it did not initially seem as user friendly as some of the other CMSs (64).

While there were guides about installing WebGUI, the team found that learning how to actually use the CMS (which modules work together, how to set up pages, etc) tool the most time. The team found assistance in the WebGUI community—both at the annual WebGUI conference and on the WebGUI forums. I thought that this commentary brought up a very important element of choosing a CMS—the community. A tool with an active and robust community using it and talking about it is superior to a tool that doesn’t have that informal support network.

It seems like the biggest takeaway from this experience for the team at Wheaton was that allowing enough time to choose, install, and learn a CMS is essential. They had initially budgeted one summer as enough time to complete this project, but it ended up taking longer. Huttenlock ends by saying, “Usability is more that just how easy a system is to use, it is based on the context of the actual tasks that someone will need to use it for” (68). This is an apt observation for this case study since the team initially didn’t think WebGUI would be a good CMS judging by its look, but its functionality suited their needs best.

Works Cited

Terry L. Huttenlock Jeff W. Beaird Ronald W. Fordham, (2006),";\

Untangling a tangled web: a case study in choosing and implementing a CMS", Library Hi Tech, Vol. 24 Iss 1 pp. 61 - 68 Permanent link to this document: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/07378830610652112