Building the OSCOM site
Henri Bergius, Consultant Partner
Nemein Oy, Finland
ESPOO, Feb 17th 2003 --
OSCOM is an international, not-for-profit organization dedicated to
Open Source Content Management. The goal of the organization is
to bring together as many great brains as possible to build a network
and grow the community of open source content management.
Since OSCOM represents the whole Open Source CMS industry, a
"Frankenstein CMS" approach was selected for the organization's web
site. The idea was to pick the best or quickest to implement features
of different CMSs and combine them to a coherent, working web site.
The main web site and Extranet run on the Midgard framework, the site
news (blog) runs on Movable Type, and the CMS Matrix is powered by
Wyona CMS. This case study concentrates on the Midgard part of the site.
Requirements
The first OSCOM web site had been implemented mostly using manual HTML
and PHP pages for the second conference in Berkeley. This version of
the site included some material from the conferences and generic
information about OSCOM.
As there was only content, not actual functionalities, the migration of
the old site to Midgard was going to be easy. This enabled us to think
about possible improvements and new features.
The layout was the primary issue to be tackled in the site rewrite. The
old OSCOM layout was very simplistic and not too appealing visually.
The different conference sites were implemented using completely
separate layouts from the main OSCOM site.
To fix the layout issue the decision was to build a new HTML templates
using the SlideML project site. The layout template was changed into
OSCOM's orange color and slightly modified to use more CSS rules
instead of HTML tables.
The old OSCOM site also included news feeds from several CMS resources
using the RSS syndication protocol. The Magpie RSS library was selected
for providing this feature due to its easy embeddability into the
Midgard-based site layout.
OSCOM's main function has been arranging Open Source CMS conferences.
The conference arrangements have caused the need for circulating
meeting agendas and budgets. Earlier there were just placed into FTP
space somewhere, without protection or commenting capabilities. An
authenticated Extranet would obviously be a better alternative here.
Selected applications
Aegir CMS was selected as the content creation interface for the
main site. OSCOM members are working on several operating systems and
browsers, and so Aegir's support for both Internet Explorer and Mozilla
WYSIWYG editing was seen as advantageous. Aegir CMS also provides an
easy way for adding images and file attachments to the site content.
As the OSCOM site was built as a quick hobby project, the site
implementation had to be as easy as possible. For this reason it was
decided to use the existing NemeinNavBar library for mapping URI
requests to actual content in Midgard's topic and article tree.
The NemeinNavBar library works in a simple way. It is called in an
active Midgard page and given a rootlevel topic to start parsing from.
Then it parses the given URI and tries to match it to topics and
articles. If it finds the match it will instance the required
MidgardTopic or MidgardArticle object for displaying, and if it doesn't
it raises a 404 error.
To make things even easier, the decision was to use the prebuilt
Aegir Sample Site template from Aegir CMS distribution. This template
includes all the needed infrastructure for building dynamic sites,
including page elements for shoving site's navigation or a breadcrumb
trail in the site layout.
Site implementation
Using the set of prebuilt functionalities, building the base site
framework was just a matter for creating a new website in Aegir CMS,
based on the "Simple Dynamic Site" template. After the website had been
created, a new toplevel topic was created and configured as the
root_topic in the site template's code-init element. This was the only
thing needed for displaying dynamic content from Midgard's content
repository on the site.
The site's HTML layout template was copied to a new Midgard style's
ROOT element, and calls for several elements provided by the site
template were added. This included adding a <(content)> call to
the style where the actual page content was to be shown.
Some minor changes were made to the site template to accommodate
the "Frankenstein CMS" approach of the site. The Sample Site generates
its navigation directly from the topic structure, but in this case we
would need to be able to link to non-Midgard content. Because of this
the toplevel navigation was hardcoded in the site style, and
NemeinNavBar's navigation generating functions were only used for
subnavigations of the Midgard-powered site areas.
One main issue with the "Frankenstein CMS" approach was keeping
layout consistent between the site sections. For this, an empty Midgard
page was added to the system where dynamic content areas were replaced
by simple HTML comments. This empty page could then be parsed and used
as layout template by the other CMS systems.
Content creation
After the site framework had been built the only thing left to do
was copying content to Midgard from the old site. This was mostly
accomplished as a copy-paste job. Topics and articles were created as
needed. Topics to represent directories in the old system, and articles
to represent individual HTML pages. As NemeinNavBar was used, the site
navigation picked up the content structure immediately, making the site
navigateable.
Some new groups were added to the system to enable easier content
creation to other OSCOM participants. These groups were given ownership
of particular site areas and were configured to only access the "News
& Articles" area of Aegir CMS. This was the content creators'
interface was not cluttered by other Aegir CMS features like layout
management.
OSCOM Extranet
The Extranet was built as a new active page in the OSCOM website.
It was configured to use its own root_topic with the NemeinNavBar
library by overriding the site's global code-init element with a local
page element.
Authentication to the Extranet was implemented using the
NemeinAuthentication library, allowing for easy cookie-based
authentication of Midgard users.
Commenting articles was added as an additional feature to the
Extranet. This was done simply by adding a form for generating
Midgard's reply articles to the page in question. Comment display was
implemented using Midgard's :f text parser, generating simple HTML based
on ASCII formatting rules. This was comment posting was made simple
without need for a WYSIWYG editor implementation.
The same commenting system can be later extended to the public site
by either allowing users to register to the site or by saving the
comments using a "guest" account.
Conclusion
The OSCOM site project was handled very quickly, requiring only
about 4-5 hours of implementation work. This was due to being able to
build most of the site using existing infrastructure. Rapid
implementation was very important to this project, as it coincided with
opening the OSCOM conference planning process to larger audience,
making immediate requirements for better information sharing
infrastructure.
Organization members have responded quite positively to the new
authoring interfaces, and have seemed to learn the Midgard content
creation system without problems. Content authoring and user
permissions management has already been distributed within the OSCOM organizations.
The site also seems to perform quite well, and the new layout gives
a more professional image of the OSCOM organization. Since content and
structure are separated from layout in Midgard implementing changes or
complete makeovers with the layout will be a simple task.
Links
OSCOM - http://www.oscom.org/
Midgard - http://www.midgard-project.org/
Movable Type - http://www.movabletype.org/
Wyona CMS - http://www.wyona.org/
SlideML - http://www.slideml.org/
Magpie RSS - http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/
Aegir CMS - http://www.aegir-cms.org/
NemeinNavBar - http://navbar.nemein.net/
NemeinAuthentication - http://authentication.nemein.net/
Email: henri.bergius@iki.fi
Web: http://www.nemein.com/