cylexsys.com

I work for a large school district, and we have about 40 various teachers/staff members who edit various sections of the website. Right now, we just use Dreamweaver and Contribute, but that system is difficult to support and we have a number of problems with it.

We want to migrate our website to a CMS, so our "web editors" can edit the site directly from their browser, and make the entire process simpler. However, I’ve done a ton of research and I am having trouble picking a specific system, I was wondering if anyone could make a recommendation.

Threre are three main requirements:
1) Must support Active Directory (or LDAP) authentication, rather by default or with a patch/module/add-on – we want the editors to be able to log in with their existing accounts.
2) Must support per-user or per-group permissions. Such as we put several teachers in the "high school" group, and they can only edit pages related to the high school.
3) Must be extremely simple/easy for editors to use. We don’t want to teach our editors how to go through 20 steps just to create a single page. I don’t care how hard it is for the administrator side, as I can manage, but for the editors it must be simple.

Those three requirements are a must, as we’ve tried to do without those three things before for other projects, and it turned out being a disaster. Does anyone know of a CMS that meets those requirements?
Joomla lacks user/group permissions. Basically a user can either edit every page with Joomla, or they can not edit any page. There’s no way to assign certain users permissions to certain pages.

Joomla 1.6 will have this feature, but it’s in Alpha right now, and we don’t want to use potentially unstable software on a production environment.

Drupal does everything you’re looking for. It would probably be worth it to hire a professional to make it happen. You won’t have to pay anything for the software, just for the configuration.

Drupal already has very good support for multiple editor levels. The CCK module makes page-editing a breeze. When a user is on a page she is authorized to modify, any moddable sections have their own ‘edit’ button.

There is also an LDAP integration module that can be used to allow existing passwords to be used for the system. http://drupal.org/project/ldap_integration I haven’t used this myself, but it looks pretty straightforward.

I think Joomla also offers many of the same features, but you’re more likely to find a drupal dev in your area, as it’s a bit more common.

Posted web content management |