One more move – update your feeds!
I’ve been thinking about moving the blog from wordpress.com to wordpress.org for a long time, and the time has finally come!
I’ve moved everything over to Librarianbyday.net (Thanks Blake!)
To keep up on new posts you’ll need to update your feeds, other than that everything pretty much looks exactly the same. See you there!
The Library is…
For National Library Week we asked patrons what the library is to them. These are some of the responses so far, they go all around the pillar.
I also took individual pictures of them, go look at them, they’re awesome! You have to forgive me this is one of the last chances I’ll have to brag about all the awesome things MRRL does and I’m extra proud since this was my idea! 
Some of my personal favorites
Change is coming – a new job for me
There is no way to say this other than to just come out and say it.
Effective May 18th I will be the Digital Branch Manager of the Chattahoochee Valley Regional Library System. This is a new position they have created for the purpose of planning, building and managing the Digital Branch, its going to be a lot of fun (and hard work!) I’m excited, nervous and about 20 other emotions right now, but most of all I’m really looking forward to it!
For those of you looking at your atlas CVRLS is in Columbus, Georgia, which means I will be spending the next couple of weeks packing my things and relocating.
Hello Minnesota!
I’m in Minnesota this week teaching Reference in the Digital Age at multiple locations and Get Your Game On: Using Video Games as Outreach at one location.
So far Minnesota is beautiful and everyone it super nice!
I’ll be resuming your regularly scheduled and opinionated blog posts next week.
Implementing CMS: Public
Aubri Keleman, Teen Services & Web Coordinator, Whatcom County Library System
Tao Gao, Live2Create Interactive
Aubri -
Rumba with Joomla
What is a cms and why is it wicked cool? The webmaster doesn’t have to do anything
Pre-redesign
- collect stats
- review your brand
- collect photos – tell a story
- focus groups
- set explicit goals in priority order
redesign questions
- do staff and leadership know why a new website is needed
- which cms is best for us
- what can we afford money vs time vs design
- how much staff time can we put into the redesign & upkeep;
- do you need to outsource or do you have the talent you need on staff
- how will decisions be made, who gets the final say
- who is the best for the website
- how will staff be involved in the redesign process
- what project management tool should we use – blogs and wikis, they used a wiki
goal wc3 compliant
new page – www.wcls.org
results
- increased user feedback
- more content, more up to date content
- users spend more time on our site
- improved navigation
- w3c compliant
- flexibility
Problems
- you cant limit authors to just one page or section
- calendar
- migration
CM Tools: Drupal, Joomla, & Rumba
CM Tools: Drupal, Joomla, & Rumba
Ryan
ModX
How not to have to use drupal
Cms in general
Why joomla
Why switch to ModX
Good content mngmt system should facilitate division of labor, support overall development, ensure best practices and standards
Halifax public library now in modx looked the same in joomla
Its not about the front end, its about the cockpit, ask long as the front end performs its about making the lives of your staff happy
Why they choose joomla
Number 1 in market share
Huge community of support
Templates
www.opensourcecms.com – demo of anything, can see how the back end looks and works
why they switched to ModX from Joomla
painful upgrade
started looking useful stuff – code etc, wanted to look at new services, joomla is not that great for adding unique
nice interface but doesn’t help the development of the site
ModX
Has fine grain user access, can restrict access to specific pages
Resources
What he does like
Still needs work
Needs more documentation
Some syntax knowledge required
Joomla really good for an intranet, wouldn’t recommend for a front end site,
community engagement is more important that community size
application framework
John
If youre not thinking about cms at this point you are doing yourself a really big disservice
Drupal – named open source cms of the year for the last 2 years
Not as easy as joomla – steep learning curve
How drupal handles content
Nodes – not a page, not a post
Blog post could be a node, drupal considers that content type
Content creation kit (CCK) – allows you to create new content types
Taxonomy system – drupa allows you to create your own classification system for your content types
Drupal allows you to structure sites so that content is on more than one page, on front page and on book groups page for example
Templating system – php standard, html with php tags and code
Sopac is completely template driven
If you don’t like how something looks you can make it look exactly how you want it to
api system api.drupal.org
hooks
drupal website is the place to start if youre interested in having drupal in your system
sopac was built on top of drupal because they were confident that drupal was a viable product
thesocialopac.net
questions
if you were starting with drupal now would you go with 6 or 7? Answer 7 hasn’t been officially released yet, so use 6
learning curve problems – some people have a problem with the taxonomy system, even John runs into things he doesn’t know and has to go to the site and look it up
moving from one system to another, are there tools to facilitate a move from joomla to drupal? Ryan – probably but the tools might not be that trustworthy, always be looking forward, what is the next upgrade, how difficult is the next upgrade John – migration is not easy, he advises against if possible
mentioned not hacking the core code, can you explain – John if you tweak code & drupal upgrades the file that you changed might have changed so you need to compare, very time consuming
modx has snippets, allows you to change code from back end with out breaking it
how easy to migrate from an existing site in php to one of these tools? Manually migrating your content,
if modx went away where would you go? Ryan – drupal
Web 2.x Training
I promised some links to the people who were in my talk yesterday.
Library Learning 2.0 or 29 Things
Slides from my patron training classes are in my slideshare account
