I liked a post on Robert O’Toole’s blog: The Ikea effect – why we should build a flat–pack V[R]LE
He’s talking about a V[R]LE which I’m assuming is much like a VLE. But I thought the aspects on how people like to build their own things, especially when it’s made easy, related well to our CMS project.
Our CMS strategy is in two phases. First we are building some backend elements – we’re calling these Content Factories, and these will manage certain types of content to enable easy re-use. These Content Factories will provide content to a variety of web properties regardless of whether they are CMS-driven. So we could use them to inject content into Sharepoint, a Portal, and even a flat HTML page (because we run PHP over most of them).
Secondly we’ll be building a “CMS Kit” to hand out to our departments. This will provide them with a standard CMS web interface to edit basic flat content, but will also be pre-prepared to use the Content Factory feeds.
So this “CMS kit” we’re planning is an IKEA flat pack.
I also liked the note of warning about people getting over-invested in the things they build. Our web authors are currently using some very nice Dreamweaver tools and snippets that we’ve developed over the last two years. Getting them off those and into the CMS might be hard. The solution is to make the CMS so much easier that they’d be silly not to use it.
. Anyhow, here’s a screenshot that I’ve not asked permission to show yet…
