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Thread: CMS Options
Number of posts in this thread: 4 (In chronological order)
From: Prickett, Elizabeth
Date: Fri, Feb 05 2016 6:59AM
Subject: CMS Options
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Good morning!
Our college is still looking for options to replace our ancient Joomla website. We've done some demos with Cascade Server (Hannon Hill), OUCampus (OmniUpdate), and TerminalFour. Do any of you have experience with any of these three vendors when it comes to accessibility, usability and responsiveness? I've received some feedback from users on the listserv before about Cascade and OUCampus, with more positive comments on OUCampus. Has anyone reviewed or implemented TerminalFour? We'd like to find a solution on which we can fairly easily train our content managers, too.
Thanks for any information or testimonials you may have!
Have a wonderful weekend,
Liz Prickett
Alternative Media Specialist
Center for Academic & Professional Excellence (CAPE)
Victoria College
2200 E. Red River Street
Victoria, TX 77901
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(361) 573-3291, ext. 3243
From: Wu, Jingjing
Date: Fri, Feb 05 2016 7:36AM
Subject: Re: CMS Options
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Good morning, Liz!
I am also interested in this topic. We don't have any CMS in use and are planning to find a proper one. How do you decide which vendors to invite?
Thanks,
Jingjing Wu
Web Librarian
From: Cliff Tyllick
Date: Fri, Feb 05 2016 8:26AM
Subject: Re: CMS Options
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Recently I helped Knowbility tweak the site for their ATSTAR program (training for teachers about disability and AT) recently. It's built in Drupal.
I participated in making Drupal 7 more accessible, but even I was impressed by the accessibility of that siteânot just on the front end, but also on the back end. The latest release, Drupal 8, has taken compliance with ATAG to the next level, as well as responsive design.
If you're not familiar with ATAG, it's like WCAG but for authoring tools. Basically, it amounts to dealing with these questions:
' How accessible is the tool itself?
' How well does the tool support the creation of accessible content?
Just Wednesday, Mike Gifford of Open Concept Consulting gave a webinar about the accessibility features of Drupal 8. I'll see if I can find a public link to a recording.
That said, I honestly don't know if WordPress is robust enough for an enterprise-level CMS, but they have recently made huge gains in accessibility. So look into them, too. And of course you need to consider security, so weigh those issues based on your situation, too.
Others on this list have led the search for a vendor for their enterprise CMS, so I hope they will chime with insights based on their experience. But I think in looking for a vendor, I would require them to they do each of these in their proposals:
' Provide examples of sites they have developed that are accessible.
' Explain how the CMS they used supports accessibility.
' Demonstrate that the administrative interface is accessible.
' Show how they simplify the content creation interface. (Even with a perfect CMS, the developer would have to make many decisions that will affect the authoring interface. How did they ensure that people who need to reorganize sites could do that, but people who just contribute content weren't presented with an overwhelming array of options they aren't even supposed to touch?)
' No CMS is perfect. Explain what barriers to accessibility they discovered and what they did to solve the issue. Double bonus points if part of that answer is that they contributed their solution back to the open source community. If they were able to develop a module or theme that the community accepted and others now use, you can check the issue queue for that item for examples of how many problems their first attempt had, how well they understood the issues, and how well they solved those problems. The discussions they engaged in would even give you a good sense of how well they work with customers. Are they professional, responsive, and polite?
As I said, I'll be interested to see what others say.
Cliff Tyllick
Accessibility Specialist
Texas Department of Assistive and Rehabilitative Services
Sent from my iPhone
Although its spellcheck often saves me, all goofs in sent messages are its fault.
> On Feb 5, 2016, at 8:36 AM, Wu, Jingjing < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
>
> Good morning, Liz!
>
> I am also interested in this topic. We don't have any CMS in use and are planning to find a proper one. How do you decide which vendors to invite?
>
> Thanks,
> Jingjing Wu
> Web Librarian
>
>
From: Andrews, David B (DEED)
Date: Fri, Feb 05 2016 9:02AM
Subject: Re: CMS Options
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I think you have gotten some pretty good advice here from other folks. As has been pointed out, the output side is most important, but often forgotten is the backend or administrative side. My Department uses Tridion, which produces pretty accessible pages, however, the backend is one of the most inaccessible applications I have ever tried to use. And, of course, our person in charge of updating our site, is a screen reader user!
Dave
David Andrews | Chief Technology Officer
Department of Employment and Economic Development
State Services for the Blind, 2200 University Ave. W., Suite 240, St. Paul MN 55114
Direct: 651-539-2294 | Mobile: 612-730-7931
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