Archives for December 2002

Content Management (cont). I’ve been looking at different PHP based content management systems. One interesting metaphor is a scrapbook: http://craftysyntax.com/myscrapbook/. Novice users can associate the chapters and pages as containing “grouped content”. While I think this is an interesting idea, I think over time people would find it too cute. It’s a lot like Microsoft Bob. Bob usability tested well and users felt it was “easy” to understand and use. However, over days of usage people found Bob to be annoying and the “ease of use” features that helped them get started were now in the way of getting stuff done.

So, how do you make content management “easy” for users? My view is that you need to use the file system. Users have been socialized that the file system is a place where you “save”, “launch”, “view”, “copy”, “cut”, “paste”, “properties”, and “look” for items. Users understand these concepts from years of interacting with the file system.

What are the key concepts for “dynamic web pages”?

• Rendering. Rendering is the process of combining code, content, and user properties into HTML which is rendered by a web browser like Internet Explorer. Rendering can happen on the server, client, or a combination of both. There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach. The key advantage of server rendering is that server applications (databases, authentication, content mgmt) can be used by the web server to render HTML tailored to a specific user. The key disadvantage is that the web server does all of the processing which results in having to purchase more servers as your computation or user base increases. The key advantages of client rendering are that all of the processing occurs on the client, the client can easily aggregrate content from multiple web sites, and the client can take advantage of applications running locally. The key disadvantages are browser capability between platforms and vendors and reliance on “web services” (more on this later). The final rendering is compilation. Compilation is where you take a template and compile or transform it into HTML. Fields or variables in the template are combined with data to create custom versions of a template for a particular category, topic, or page. Think of it as mail merge. The right solution is a combination of client, server, and compilation with templates.
• Editing. Editing is a familar term to most users expect editing in HTML is really programming. You’re in charge of writing text that controls the presentation and content. Early word processors marked up documents this way until Microsoft Word and others hid the formatting commands from the user (WYSIWG). Unfortunately, HTML isn’t a very friendly language to edit in. Tags like <TABLE BORDER=1 CELLPADDING=0 CELLSPACING=0><TR><TD VALIGN=TOP> are required to create a table. There are some good HTML editors out there but generally, users need to understand the underlying HTML to coerce the presentation to the right thing. Tricks like &nbsp;<BR> to force a non-empty table cell are common practice. HTML is content, layout, and presentation. Different sections of a web page require specialized editing tools.
• Publishing. The web equivalent of saving and distribution via email is publishing. You publish a web site from a local staging location to the live web site. This means you most likely have two copies of your web site. One you’re editing and one that is “published” or publicly viewable. Most web pages are edited locally and published to a web server in the cloud. FrontPage, Homesite and other web publishing programs have a rich Win32 client that edits and maintains a local copy of the web site. A user can then publish the web site to their public server via FTP or FrontPage Server extensions.
• Database. Most web pages are tailored with content or to a specific user. Users who want to create “dynamic web” pages need to understand databases because this is where all customization data is stored. Think of this as the data for a mail merge (rendering). Most databases are based on SQL which is a rich and powerful structured query language.

In sum, creating a dynamic web page isn’t as simple as writing a memo or piece of email. It’s programming. Users need to understand a lot of computer science concepts and how they interact to build a dynamic web page. The trick is how to make most of this transparent to the user while giving them the rich functionality, flexibility and individuality of statement this require.

More on this topic later this week…