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• 1 2023-03-24T14:00:48+00:00 Other Platforms to Consider 1 Wordpress, Omeka, and Scalar address many of the use cases we see in the Office of Digital Research and Scholarship. However, there are other platforms available on CreateFSU (and dozens more we can add, if you would like to use them). The applications listed here may be useful to you if you have a very specific use case in mind, or if you really want to get into the web development side of things. plain 2023-03-24T14:00:48+00:00

  Wordpress, Omeka, and Scalar address many of the use cases we see in the Office of Digital Research and Scholarship. However, there are other platforms available on CreateFSU (and dozens more we can add, if you would like to use them). The applications listed here may be useful to you if you have a very specific use case in mind, or if you really want to get into the web development side of things.

  Commons in a Box

  Commons in a Box is designed to organize a particular community. It is often use for universities, consortia, and entire disciplines. It allows for community discussion, posting, and collaboration. Commons in a Box could be useful if you want to organize a discussion group for members of your discipline or provide a virtual meeting place for practitioners in your field. Keep in mind, though, that any open discussion place you create will need to be moderated, and that is a lot of work. If you want to keep the community small, though, this could be a great option!

  Drupal

  Drupal is a lot like WordPress in that it is a content management system that specializes in posts and pages. It differs from WordPress in that the layouts, content types, and themes are generally a lot more customizable. However, it is important to note that this flexibility is made possible by a steep learning curve. Drupal may allow you to create robust content types, add new metadata fields, change block layouts for your pages, and more, but there are many headaches involved in the process before that point. Drupal is probably the most famous for being the content management system that most of FSU's campus uses. So if you want to try your hand at Drupal, it could possibly help you be webmaster for your department!

  Grav

  Grav is a "flat file" content management system, which means that there is no underlying database. Remember the 1997 library website in the first part of this lesson? This was a flat file site. Grav brings flat-file sites into the 21st century by making them more aesthetically pleasing and easier to manage. Benefits of building a flat-file or static site are largely that the content remains pretty up-to-date with web technologies. The page is much less likely to stop displaying because of a broken plugin or out-of-date dependency. Additionally, if your audience has slow internet access, flat file sites can load faster. The downside is that there is less of a GUI than your other CMSs, and the structure can get a little confusing. If you want to start to experiment with the web infrastructure side of things, definitely give Grav a try!

  MediaWiki

  The entirety of Wikipedia is built on MediaWiki. It is a great platform for creating and editing documentation, especially if you want it to be edited by collaborators. While Wikipedia may have open editing, you don't need to have your site be open for all to edit. It could be a great supplemental site that includes data dictionaries, project procedures, or other documentation you want to share with your audience or collaborators.

• 1 2023-03-24T14:00:48+00:00 What are applications and CMSs? 1 plain 2023-03-24T14:00:48+00:00

  In the early days of the internet, the primary way to publish a website was with flat HTML files. If you remember sites from the 90s and early 2000s, you may have an image of a flat white background, with serif font text, and very simple styling. The FSU Libraries website from 1997 is a perfect example of this.

  While it may be tempting to think of static sites as merely a matter of aesthetics, the crux of static sites is largely what is happening on the back-end. Early static sites often consist only of flat HTML files that are generally hand-authored and styled by CSS. If a user had write-access to the server that the files were stored on, they could edit any part of the file, and any user with an internet connection could read the file. Additionally, any little blocks of text that you want to repeat on multiple pages (like blog excerpts in a blog roll or featured items in a digital collection), would potentially need to be written by hand into multiple locations.

  With a content management system, you have a database on the back end that facilitates a lot of these user controls. For example, a content management system may allow a user to author draft content but not publish it. In other cases a logged-in user may be allowed to leave a comment, but a non-logged-in user would not be able to. Additionally, content management systems can help with things like creating feeds and block elements. For example, if you want a project team member to have a title, biography, picture listed on every blog post they write, you can use a CMS to create one snippet for each team member, and call that snippet in for every new post they author. CMSs reduce the amount of labor you have to do to keep a site coherent and secure.

  Content Management Systems also help to limit the type of content that can appear on the page. This can help you keep consistent styles, layouts, and designs across your whole website. This is especially useful for projects whose content needs consistent metadata and description. It can also be helpful for projects with multiple collaborators who need structure to ensure they are all creating content in the same way.

  And finally, CMSs create an administrative interface that lets you be at least one step removed from the code that underlies the site. While you will be given the option to create and edit HTML snippets, you will largely be able to use what we call a WYSIWYG (pronounced "wizzywig") editor. WYSIWYG is short for "What You See is What You Get." These visual editors make web creation much easier by allowing you to see the site as it will appear published while you are still editing content. 

  Overall, CMSs make the work of publishing your project's website much easier. But choosing a CMS that fits your project's goals and data is an essential part of building a website. In this unit, we will be discussing how CMSs work in CreateFSU, how to install applications, some commonly-used CMSs, and how to decide what CMS to use.