WordPress Website Baker Percussion Rhythmyx Plone Wikis Drupal Freeway Joomla! ModX phpWebSite Typo3 HTML and server-side includes DreamWeaver ...amongst others I’ve tried and used
What typically happens you have to repeat yourself data get wasted & lost content & presentation become inconsistent information in templates gets broken & petrifies information ages, withers & dies users play fast & loose the larger the site the worse the problems
No happy medium there’s not enough freedom users can’t do what they need to there’s too much freedom users can easily do things they shouldn’t ... at the same time
Information, not just data we want information, not useless stupid data templates don’t hold information semantic modelling of real-world relationships use semantics to inform output and assist the user
Organisations generally want to publish information about themselves need to be contacted have members ... who occupy roles stand in relation to other organisations ...and have others within them ... and are parts of others hold events have news ... and so on
SCHOOL OF MEDICINE CANCER & GENETICS INFECTION & IMMUNITY MEDICAL EDUCATION EXPERIMENTAL MEDICINE PSYCHOLOGY & NEUROSCIENCE CLINICAL EPIDEMIOLOGY HAS OTHER ORGANISATIONS WITHIN IT
CARDIFF UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE CANCER & GENETICS INFECTION & IMMUNITY MEDICAL EDUCATION EXPERIMENTAL MEDICINE PSYCHOLOGY & NEUROSCIENCE CLINICAL EPIDEMIOLOGY PHYSICS MUSIC MATHEMATICS LAW BIOSCIENCES ARCHITECTURE PSYCHOLOGY EUROPEAN STUDIES COMPUTER SCIENCE ENGINEERING DENTISTRY OPTOMETRY CHEMISTRY ARCHEOLOGY AND IS PART OF A LARGER ORGANISATION
Entities an organisation School of Medicine a part of an organisation Institute of Infection & Immunity Research Office a group of other entities Research institutes Administrative & support offices a collection of people Web editors
django CMS & Arkestra django CMS & Arkestra grew up together have been developed alongside each other portions of django CMS conceived as part of Arkestra integration with pages, placeholders/plugins, menus
designs & layouts are not baked in to templates we need only a few, simple, templates it frees & constrains users it encourages good practice it produces decent output it’s easy to use it makes modifying site templates easier it makes pages inspectable by the system
Some numbers 4000 pages a day about 10000 pages of content 1383 manually-created (django CMS) pages 1879 people in 2392 roles across 180 entities 504 news articles and 711 events 2582 plugins (links, images, news, events, etc) around 40 web editors
September 2008: heard about Python & Django April/May 2009: took a 5-day Python/Django course May 2009: understood the concept of a model May 2009: started working on Arkestra July 2009: understood the concept of a method December 2009: Arkestra launched to our users March 2010: our Arkestra site went live! March 2012: Arkestra fit for public consumption
Who’s using Arkestra? Cardiff University School of Medicine Iceland Academy of the Arts Cell Medica Ltd (medical research company) The Laugharne Weekend (literature/music festival) ... plus several of my own
Thanks to Python and Django, I stopped being a frustrated and resentful user of horrible, badly- designed web CMS software that I could do nothing about.