About the Division of Physical Sciences CMS

The Division of Physical Sciences Content Management System (CMS) can be thought of a web templating system: you create content (i.e. information about your research, departmental events, etc.) without worrying about general layout (a huge pain when developing web pages from scratch), put that content into the CMS, and your content is dynamically integrated into the Division template. Because the hard parts of creating web pages are managed by the CMS (navigation, layout, etc.), using the CMS is much easier and faster developing an entire web site - this means that you can get your information up on the Museum's web site quickly, and can keep existing sites up-to-date easily.

Although there there is a learning curve associated with using the CMS to create your web pages, the curve very quickly flattens out: you don't have to learn much to create great looking web pages. For the most basic of web pages, if you can write an text-formatted e-mail about your research, you can create a web page using the CMS (no, you can't just e-mail your research to the CMS - or to the CMS developers!). If you know how to manage folders in Windows or on MacOS to organize images and documents (such as you might do if you were writing a paper or presentation), then you will easily be able to create complex web pages in the CMS.

To give credit where credit is due, this CMS is built upon the open-source project Plone. I have modified some of the code to do what I wanted, and have modified the default layout (or skin) somewhat, but the bulk of the code is from Plone. Plone itself is built upon another open-source project, Zope. I'll often refer to the Division CMS as Plone because there is really little difference from the user's (that's you) point of view. (In fact, I will probably drop the moniker "Division CMS" at some point — I started using it when I thought I would be modifying Plone more heavily than I did: the "CMS" is really just an extension of Plone, not a different, but derived, system.)

If you're wondering why we should use the CMS, rather than writing normal HTML pages or using a web development tool like FrontPage or DreamWeaver, I've written a page about the rationale behind the CMS.

Where else to look for information

Since the AMNH CMS was built using Plone and Zope, the best thing to do is to look at the documentation for these projects:

• Plone
  • The Plone Book
• Zope

Note that most of the content in these sites and books is about managing Plone-based sites and dealing with the underlying software, not about using the Plone interface to create new web pages in an existing Plone site (like the Division CMS). The following tutorial is meant to provide the information you will need to add content to the CMS.

Creating Documents

• Five ways to create documents in the CMS - Introduction
  • An introduction to Structured Text
  • A few words on creating documents with Plain Text
  • HTML for Dummies (with PhDs)
  • The WYSIWYG editor, Epoz
  • Uploading your documents into the CMS
• Multi-page documents

CMS ''Style guide''

The following notes aren't really so much about style as they are suggestions that will make integrating content into the CMS a bit easier. By using the CMS you are locked into a certain framework: this frees you from many of the concerns of organizing your information - allowing you to concentrate more on the important stuff, like content - but it also restricts the ways in which your content can be presented. If you start inputing content into the CMS with a fixed idea of how you want your information to be displayed (such as the layout of a pre-CMS page you had), you will likely be in for a frustrating time: there are some things the which CMS will not let you do, or which are awkward to do. The point to keep in mind when using the CMS: Keep It Simple.

• Division ''style'' guide
• Style ''FAQ''