Kalamazoo College
Rationalizing the web
Nightmares and Dreamscapes
Prior to its adoption of the Reason Content Management System (CMS) Kalamazoo College had no content-management system of any kind. Individual departments had wide latitude in choosing style, content and even management tools. For most the tool of choice was Dreamweaver, and much time was devoted to the unfruitful task of instructing department administrative assistants and faculty members on the basic points of web design.
The college did not hire a full-time web coordinator until 2002, and the occupants of this position encountered numerous problems: design decisions made on the local (department) level, duplication of content, inconsistent practices, and myriad support problems. In short, everything you'd expect from tossing a site license of Dreamweaver at a group of people chosen at random without imposing a structure or establishing best practices.
Information Services looked toward a CMS to resolve several problems. A CMS would enforce the separation between content, layout and style. It would eliminate the need to train staffers in the principles of web design and permit the gradual reduction of the Dreamweaver license. It would take certain design choices off the individual user's table, thus re-establishing centralized control. Finally, it would free up staff time to focus on development and innovation.
If you'll excuse the mixed metaphor, by the organizational chart flies Kalamazoo College has a one-person Web Services department. Any prospective CMS would need minimal support costs, at least after the initial rollout. In addition to head of Web Services Kalamazoo College has a member of the desktop support team familiar with SQL, PHP and Apache who moonlights as a staff programmer. Any potential CMS rollout would have to work around these very real limitations.
The Reason CMS was a product of Carleton's internal development environment, which in 2007 meant POSIX, Apache and PHP 4. In contrast, Kalamazoo College was at the time primarily a Windows shop with IIS web servers running PHP 5. When deciding to go with Reason the technical staff evaluated the perceived difficulty in migrating Reason across environments. Encouraged by Carleton's assurances that the Reason codebase was mostly operating system agnostic and moving toward PHP 5 anyway, Kalamazoo took the plunge.
The success of an open source project rests on the engagement of its community. During the Summer of 2007 Kalamazoo had frequent recourse to Carleton as it worked to adapt Reason to its own environment. More than one email began "I'm sure this makes sense at Carleton, but...". Happily the developers at Carleton were always quick with advice and background, and in the end no problem proved insurmountable. Particularly helpful was a visit developer Nate White paid to the campus toward the end of the summer, which Charles Fulton was able to repay in October 2008. Between direct email contact and a Google Code project, help with Reason development and administration is never far away.
Needful Things
Reason CMS is a free open-source project which was developed at Carleton College.
During a presentation in early 2008 Kalamazoo College identified seven selling points for Reason CMS:
- Mini-sites
- Granular access-control
- Faculty/staff pages
- Unicode support
- Collaboration
- Decentralization
- Campus directory support
The mini-site is by far the most important of these and the key to the entire endeavour. With the mini-site, the conceptual design of a page is taken out of the hands of the end user, and the presentation is dictated entirely by the type of content the user wishes to present.
In September 2009 Kalamazoo College has over ninety individual Reason sites under the control of their various departments, groups and constituencies. By migrating a site to Reason IT retains control over the overall presentation of an individual site while passing on the bulk of the support costs to the end users.