CMS and Groupware
CMS and Groupware
Content Management Systems
One of my primary interests and project areas since 1999 has been the development of Content Management Systems (CMS). It is the purpose of a CMS to allow distributed access to adding content - in the form of pages, pictures and other media - to a website, and editing this content. This should be possible without the need of the editors to know or learn specific languages and technologies like HTML.
While at e-scape interactive and Tribal DDB I designed, developed and implemented Content Management Systems for several customers. And in 2000 I was in charge of developing a new CMS for Sony, allowing them to easily distribute editing access to the content of Sony Europe and Sony organisations in 28 European countries and regions.
One of the early XML-based CMS was developed for Matas
The CMS is build using an XML document-base for the pages of content, and XSLT-stylesheets for presentation. Editing of content takes place directly on the given page in a webbrowser - just like editing for example a Word-document. Different editors can be given access to administration of different parts of the site, and can - after logging in - change all the content of a page from anywhere in the world he or she is located.
At a later stage we also developed a versatile Content Delivery System (CDS) for dynamically personalizing content and presentation to given criteria at the time of the presentation of the specific page.
McDonald's homepage was implemented using the CMS/CDS system
Other websites implemented using this CMS core system includes:
New CMS for Zoo
In the summer of 2003 I was asked by Copenhagen Zoo to implement a new corporate look and page layout/design on their website. I had developed the original CMS for Zoo in 2000 while still at e-scape interactive, as one of the first solutions to rely heavily on the use of XML as document-format and XSLT for all presentation.
It was a straightforward and quick process to change the old XSLT-template (using HTML design made by graphic-artists at e-scape) with a new template, composed from the up-to-date design by an external graphics designer.
Zoo homepage with the new look running on the newest CMS
In addition to this, I developed a completely new CMS system - called CC CMS - and replaced the older system on Zoo's site with this. Since the new CMS was built around a different XML vocabulary than the original, all the XML-documents in the site-structure (nearly 1000) had to be converted which was done using a simple folder-parsing script and an XSLT-stylesheet doing the data-to-data transformation, so no pages needed to be manually altered.
Groupware: SWWWING - Intranet in a Box
After my first year at BusinessNet Danmark doing ASP-programming (mainly e-commerce and workflow-automation), I was the architect of SWWWING 2.0 - Intranet in a Box, and designed the formal core-philosophy in this widely-used Groupware-product. Central in this system is a highly distributed userrights-complex and personalisation-system.
To ensure maximum platform-coverage, it was decided to develop the product entirely in PHP and C.
In SWWWING, administration and maintenance of information topics and areas can be distributed to editors. Administration and maintenance of the organisation, such as groups, departments and users can be distributed to local administrators. No deep technical knowledge is necessary in order to maintain the information. This reduces the costs and setup the speed for information distribution.
Graph showing example of simplified Swwwing design philosophy
My central idea for the Swwwing design was to take the typical hierarchies of organisation, information, and presentation (the latter not typically being hierarchical in structure, though) and combine these into a single hierarchy. This had several advantages: For example when assigning, distributing, and inheriting access-rights - not only to information, but to editing, and changing organisational structures as well.
Many companies today use SWWWING as their main communication-platform (More than 150.000 licenses in Denmark alone). In the years after my departure from BusinessNet Danmark, Swwwing has been further developed and is now called Swwwing 3000 Intranet.
Mobile communication - SMS & WAP
In 1999 - after having started working at e-scape interactive I had the oppotunity to get my feet wet with mobile-based interactivity. One solution was an automated SMS-based, database-driven game developed for danish telco SONOFON: Questions were sent from central databases to players via SMS, and their answers - also in the form of SMS-messages - were stored.
Another project involved making a WAP-wrapper around an existing online database for Audi and VolksWagen in Denmark, allowing users to access and search the information in the databases via WAP-enabled phones: So now you can locate Audi and VolksWagen retailers anywhere in Denmark, and search - and see details of - their available used- and demo-cars - via your phone.
Locating a used A4 at www.audi.dk/wap/ using WAP phone.
TV-show homepage
In January 2005 I helped Blu Productions convert the (Photoshop based) design for the homepage of Stjerne for en aften, to HTML and CSS. The site also incorporated discussion-fora and streaming of each participants latest performance.
Page showing result after final show