CMS Interview

The University of South Carolina Aiken Gregg-Graniteville Library website is powered by PMWiki. Two librarians graciously gave of their time to give their views on the website.

Kaetrena Davis Kendrick is a Reference Librarian and was the first contact by phone. All further contact was by email. She referred the questions to Paul Lewis, the Documents Librarian and Webmaster.

Kaetrena offered her views on usage:

I find PM Wiki OK for a small school like USC Aiken. The library had the option of conforming to the "uniform" look but decided to retain independence instead - the decision to use PM Wiki is something that happened before I got here. That being said, I do find it limiting in terms of what you can do in terms of its look. As you can see, there is only one font, maybe two. We have a small staff, but even so, there is limited access to the server, so whenever we want to upload:

- Widgets

- Large files

- Update fonts

We must go into the server via Paul or Stan, and quite frankly, not many of us are familiar with the language PMWiki runs on, so it's just as well (however knowing/learning such a thing would be a huge learning curve, and hence that's another limitation). I'd much rather have a drop and drag, widget-friendly, low-learning curve impact medium to work with; however, this is what we have, and as I go along I'm sure I will make do with it. That being said, it seems to work well with Google applications (see our library calendar -that's a Google calendar!)

We've already undergone one update (I revamped the website Spring 2010)...so perhaps by the time we are due another update, I will have discovered something else - or squeezed the functionality of PMWiki til it cries.

Paul, as webmaster, answered the questions.

1. How and where did they hear about CMS?

Gee, it's been so long now I don't remember exactly. Probably while researching on the web about ways to improve our library web site.

2. What were their motivations to adopt CMS for its current use (library website or any other purpose)?

I was very unhappy with hand html coding all of the library web pages. And dealing with all the little edits and FTPing to the server was tedious. I was highly motivated.

3. What were their decision making criteria? What is the name of CMS they are using now?

I wanted our website to be much easier to maintain and much easier for the other librarians to contribute and we wanted the website to be XHTML compliant. Currently we use PmWiki (http://www.pmwiki.org) and we are very, very happy with it.

4. What are the important benefits or advantages of CMS they are

using now over the old system or another CMS system they've used in

the past?

The biggest advantage I think is that all the librarians feel very comfortable with adding content and making updates to the website. This was not the case when everything had to be hand coded and ftp'd. We tried another CMS at the very beginning. PHPWebsite (http://phpwebsite.appstate.edu/). It offered many features, but, at the time it seemed less focused on building actual web pages and more focused on the other features. At the time it produced ugly urls. I see they've addressed this. The librarians hated the ugly urls. It had a high learning curve at the time for both website contributors and the admin (me). PHPWebsite promised XHTML compliance but never really delivered on that when we used it.

5. How was the learning curve?

For contributors PmWiki is very easy to learn. One quick hour long workshop and that was it. Administration is easy as well. PmWiki uses flat text files for data storage and this simplifies administration and backup considerably for me.

All the CMS packages I've used require a MySQL or some other database backend. My database skills are minimal. I have built a number of databased backed CMS sites, but I alway go weak in the knees when upgrades are needed.

Other CMS packages I've used:

Xoops

TikiWiki

GeekLog