Straight from the horse's mouth

On Friday, May 24^th I interviewed Raylynn Hughes , Director of continuing education services, who supervises both DCPL website and it’s intranet, and Jim Lo, the E-branch manager and library web designer. The subject of the interview was DCPL’s use of Content Management System (CMS). 

A.M. Thank you for agreeing to answer my questions on such short notice. I will try not to take a lot of your time. To start with, how does DCPL use CMS?

R.H. We use a combination of Joomla, WordPress, and custom code for our main website and Plone for OLLI, our staff intranet.

A.M. What did you use before CMS?

R.H. We just used HTML.

A.M. How long have you been using CMS and why did you choose it?

J.L. In 2007, when I started working with DCPL, we began investigating our options. CMS was an easy choice, because it offered several important features that we required. It allowed us to separate content from design, in other words we could add content, while overall design stays consistent throughout the site. It does not require writing code, and it allows updating by multiple users. Cost was another consideration, so choosing an option that was free was ideal. Then we began looking for the right CMS.

A.M. What did you chose and what were the criteria?

J.L. We considered many options and looked at the pros and cons of each of them. Nothing was perfect, but Joomla was chosen fairly quickly because at the time it was the only CMS that had built-in events calendar. It turned out not to be a perfect system, so we had to supplement it with WordPress for our blogs, podcasts, and for kids and teens sections of the website. In addition, we had to add some custom code to accommodate other needs that could not be met by either system.

A.M. What about a learning curve?

J.L. “Wrestling” with Joomla to get it to do what we wanted took a long time. I had no previous experience with it and had to get used to it. Since then we gained a lot of experience and understand that we could have done many things differently, including choosing a system other than Joomla, but we made the best choice with the information and the expertise we had at the time.

A.M. Why did you choose a different CMS for the intranet?

R.H. For the internal site we had different requirements. The site is a lot more basic in its design, but it offers a lot of flexibility, it is easier to edit, and it offers a comprehensive search feature. However, the main criterion was access. Unlike Joomla, Plone allows to differentiate the level of access depending on the authority and other criteria, so user privileges can be different for different people. With Joomla, a user either has permission to make changes, or he does not. That is not acceptable for an internal website.

A.M. Thank you very much for your time. It was nice to meet both of you.

R.H., J.L. You are welcome. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have more questions.