Vive la communication !

Articles

A New Look and Publishing Engine for the STC France Chapter Web Site

17 February 2009

Destry Wion

Web Manager
STC France

The new France Chapter web site has been in the works for a long while now; a battle waged between volunteer time and real life. As you can see, the battle is nearly won; there are just a few things to finish up in the immediate future. In this article I would like to share a bit of the project’s background, what has changed in the new site, and what you can yet look forward to.

A Brief Look at the History

I have been in communication with Stuart Culshaw about the France Chapter web site for as nearly as long as I’ve been a STC member (2004). Back then Stuart was the chapter’s vice president and webmaster both, and the site was powered by Mambo, an open source CMS project that has since forked into what is now called Joomla! (i.e., it’s now two different projects). Open source projects generally fork when the opinions of contributing developers diverge over the direction development should go. Joomla! has since achieved greater status over its former incarnation, but it’s still a rather feature-heavy system, and that’s one reason Mambo wasn’t working for the France Chapter site to begin with, it was overkill and prone to dereliction, security breaches and a slough of other headaches.

Not to pick on Mambo, Joomla!, and other open source systems in the their (big) class, but what plagues systems like these is they try to be everything to everybody. Consequently, these big engine systems are not what I would consider to be fast, secure and flexible compared to other systems having smaller code footprints. Speed, security, flexibility, standards compliance, great admin-side usability, the simplicity of building-up a site only as needed, not stripping out or turning off functionality that isn’t — those are the things site managers and pro designers alike should care about, not bells and whistles.

The concept of building up to a site was something I kicked around with with Stuart back then. I could tell he was frustrated and tired of fighting with the Mambo install, which defied being the productive tool a CMS is supposed to be. I had hoped to remain in more regular touch with Stuart about his efforts with the Chapter site, but my volunteer time in 2004 was largely devoted to the shadowy STC Web Services team, setting up the now popular STC Forum and slightly less known STC Wiki. When I was able to look towards the France Chapter site again, Stuart had relaunched using Drupal.

Stuart’s choice to go with Drupal was reasonable, as he wanted to introduce more community-oriented features in the site to help promote member interaction, and Drupal has a history of doing this kind of thing better than other big engines in its class, as well as being more standards-oriented in the process. Nevertheless, Drupal is a big engine and thus has a big footprint too. With that comes the inevitable need for more site maintenance to keep the site functioning and secure. Being Stuart was wearing both vice president and webmaster hats, and with chapter elections once again approaching, which demanded the majority of Stuarts time, it’s no surprise the site again began to experience faltering functionality, outdated content, and security breaches. What was originally good intentions to promote more web interaction may have resulted in the opposite: alienating a few members and attracting a lot of spam. The fact Drupal’s administration interface was not one of the most usable (based on the France Chapter’s install) did not help matters any.

In second-quarter 2008, my involvement with the STC Web Services team had come full circle and I found myself more available for other things. I contacted Stuart, who had become chapter president by a unanimous decision, and offered my place as the France Chapter’s web doctor. He accepted, and here I am. I was excited to be bringing my experience to the task and looking forward to introducing some new ideas. You couldn’t ask for a better person than Stuart to pitch ideas to in this case; he has a strong web background, understands the technical specifics and lingo, and is completely open to consider different things (even if not everything makes the cut). It’s working out pretty good.

I originally wanted to approach the web redesign as a client-provider project, where STC France was the client and I the provider. This relationship being highlighted by the production and exchange of many artifacts like those generated in a real client-provider arrangement. Such artifacts would include a Cahier des charges (project deliverables agreement), a graphic brief, structural diagrams, mockups and storyboards, prototype, and so forth. Further, we would meet at various stages and get sign-off on each phase. The point of this kind of approach was to have a well-documented record of the process, and be able to use the experience as a model to write about and share with the rest of the STC.

While the client-provider idea was a good one, in reality, where volunteers have real jobs and domestic obligations, the approach was quickly forgotten and replaced with sensible guerrilla tactics. The regular meetings became once-in-a-great-while email checkups. The plethora of planned artifacts become just one — the mockups. And the prototype simply turned into the site itself; first developed locally on my Mac, then moved to an integration location online (secured), and finally replacing Drupal at stcfrance.org.

The sacrifice of client-provider planning was worth it, apparently. Upon seeing the mockups, Stuart gave big thumbs up, and the fact we could go live with a completely new site, as opposed to installments (first the conference section, then the rest of the site, as was earlier thought necessary), was even better. We did have to push the overall project time-line back a number of months (oops), but this was largely due to summer vacations, the economic crisis and other facts of life.

Changes in the New Site

Over various conversations and brainstorming we invariably agreed on five main objectives that would guide the rebuild of the France Chapter site:

  1. Choose and implement a new publishing engine that would lower overhead and be easier to use.
  2. Simplify the site architecture.
  3. Develop a content strategy (built-up and refined over time).
  4. Incorporate social media tools where reasonable.
  5. Establish a stronger sense of brand.

I would say we’ve gone a ways at meeting the first two, and to a lesser degree the last three, but there’s still some work of varying nature to do with all but the first.

A New CMS — Textpattern

Textpattern logo

Of all the objectives for the project, deciding on what new publishing engine to use took the longest. We considered and debated different open source options, and even considered building the site with a wiki engine instead, which has a lot of merit with respect to easily maintaining web copy, but in the end I told Stuart I was going to use what I thought was the best choice under the circumstances and against the other project objectives — Textpattern.

Textpattern as a Choice from Experience

Stuart already knew I had a great deal of Textpattern experience, so there wasn’t a lot of argument, though I think he was just anxious to get the show on the road and if saying “yes” meant doing that, then “yes” it would be. I’ve been using Textpattern for nearly as long as it’s been available. My own site is powered by it, and I’ve built other client sites with it as well. I also spearheaded, coordinated, and (more recently) redeveloped the structure and design of Textpattern’s documentation wiki, TextBook, so I’m relatively well-positioned with the user perspective of Textpattern too. In 2006 I wrote a two-series introduction to how Textpattern works. The articles are still quite popular by measure of my referrer logs. If you are new to Textpattern and would like to learn more about what makes it tick, you might like to read those articles. They are:

Note that Textpattern is now several versions older than when those articles were written. Near all of the content is still valid; however, there have been some new features and subtle improvements to Textpattern since then that are not mentioned or may obfuscate some of the information that is. Just something to keep in mind. I will probably write another article in that series in the near future that summarizes the first two and accounts for what is new. For a great collection of links and resources of all kinds on Textpattern, see Smashing Magazine’s article, Textpattern Developer’s Toolbox. For a good review of the principle functionality introduced in the latest Textpattern versions, see Kevin Potts’ article Textpattern 4.0.7 is Awesome.

Textpattern Highlights

My experience with Textpattern was not the only reason I chose to go with it, indeed I originally suggested to Stuart some other options to consider first, including ExpressionEngine and MODx. I particularly did not suggest WordPress, which has a much less intuitive templating process compared to Textpattern’s very intuitive native markup-like tags. I’ve trialed many open source systems built with php and MySQL and I honestly believe from empirical observation that Textpattern is near the top of the heap. Further, it was a solid choice based on the genre, size and scope of the France Chapter site, as well as for its future aims.

Following are some of Textpattern’s shining values.

Small footprint and fast!
Textpattern’s file tree is just 8 items in the root: four folders and four files. Most of the mechanics are contained in one folder. A default database from install contains just 17 well-defined tables. By comparison, the Drupal system we replaced had 36 items on the root (who knows how much at the next level), and 160 database tables. Some of those tables may have come from extensions added in the past, I don’t know, but that’s still a lot of tables. Very few of Textpattern’s extensions (called “Plugins”) require additional tables at all. Sencer Yurdagül, a former Textpattern developer, once did a Wordpress vs. Textpattern performance benchmark and found Textpattern to be up to 2.7 times faster. You won’t find too many CMS faster than Textpattern. Is there one?
Very secure — never hacked
I am almost 100% positive Textpattern has never been hacked if site owners haven’t hacked sites themselves first and opened up holes. You may get a bad impression of Textpattern’s security if you only go by the Security list provided for Textpattern at CMS Matrix, but that’s because Textpattern doesn’t try to be everything for everybody (a concept I talked about earlier). You need enterprise e-commerce? Don’t use Textpattern, and don’t confuse e-commerce security needs with Textpattern’s spotless security record. In fact, CMS Matrix’s comparison tables for Textpattern are rather misleading in a number of ways, but that’s out of scope. (Point there: always follow up your CMS research with Q&A in the actual community. It takes effort — and be mindful of the biased fan- boys/girls — but there’s no better way to truly learn about a given system.)
Intuitive semantic model and complete separation of content and presentation
Textpattern has a simple model of organization that fits precisely with the mental models most people have about site construction (with the exception of Textpattern Forms, which make people think of HTML forms, but it’s not the same thing). I’ve detailed the semantic model and how it intuitively separates content from presentation in my two articles mentioned earlier.
Easy “russian doll” construction thus lower site maintenance
Anyone who understands PHP include files will understand Textpattern forms and what is meant by russian doll construction of a web site, but even if you don’t it’s a very easy thing to grasp. Forms are essentially chunks of content or page template code that are called into place by a Textpattern tag (and some attributes on that tag). There is no limit to nesting forms, which opens incredible power and flexibility when constructing a site’s architecture. The mantra edit once and apply everywhere is what it’s all about.
Native markup tags that are as combinatorial as the periodic elements
Textpattern Tags are a wonderful thing. Analogizing them with the periodic elements is rather apt. When you become comfortable with Textpattern’s semantic model, you begin to focus on tags and the endless possible ways to use them for publishing content.
Highly usable admin-side interface that matches the semantic model
Textpattern’s admin-side is presented as a two-level series of tabbed panels. The panels are first grouped to clearly show the separation of content and presentation, then within each are the semantical elements, or “building blocks” as I like to call them. There is an additional Admin grouping where site administrators easily access all the configuration settings. To witness the admin-side for yourself without actually installing Textpattern, see the Admin-side documentation in TextBook (some pages still work in progress), or try out the Textpattern demo at opensourcecms.com.
Textile for super clean web copy writing
Textile is a type of markup language developed for web copy writers having little knowledge of regular HTML markup syntax. It’s designed so web writers can focus on words and not web code. It does involve knowing some basic Textile syntax but it’s extremely easy to use. It was originally developed by the creator of Textpattern, Dean Allen, and has since been implemented in a large number of other programming languages. Textile can be used interchangeably with regular HTML so authors who know both have greater flexibility for certain text formatting achievements. Indeed, sometimes it’s necessary to use HTML where Textile doesn’t exist or fails with handling certain character strings (e.g., irregular URLs like can be found in Wikipedia). However, any good presentation layer and associated style guide will nearly eliminate too much need for HTML worry. Textile is included in Textpattern’s core. You simply start using it right out of the box. Once you get the hang of it, which only takes writing one or two articles with it, you’re easily hooked. Textile is also used in many other CMS systems, so once you learn it, it is a skill you can take elsewhere. Often many blogs provide Textile formatting abilities in their comments so you can format blog comments as you like. Textile is truly a wonderful thing.
Helpful developers and friendly community
I could continue with the technical advantages Textpattern offers, but this is already a long article. However, it would not be complete without pointing out the amazing Textpattern community, which is one of the most helpful and courteous you’ll find online. Textpattern’s developers hold court in the forum, which is otherwise full of experienced Textpattern users and all around helpful people. You can even pitch new plugin ideas for functionality you might need and likely see it picked up by one of the plugin developer heroes if it has worth for other users too. This kind of community is a welcome gem when selecting a CMS to use.

A Simpler Architecture and New Content Strategy

Consider this section the view of an outsider new to the team.

One thing notably lacking with regard to the France Chapter’s web content strategy was there wasn’t any. Though certainly not the intention, I know, it seemed web content was filled in when there was a need, by whomever had the chance, with little consideration of the overall architecture, semantics and optimization of content. Not even a style guide existed that I’m aware of, and the WYSIWYG editor implemented in Drupal didn’t help separate content from presentation.

This is no fault to Stuart or anyone else on the team. I know full well that any virtual community in STC struggles to get enough volunteer help to do things as effectively as would like to be done. I already noted that Stuart once filled both vice president and webmaster roles back in the day, and the trend continues today. Board positions are vacant and good folk like Ellen Lebelle fills two to keep things afloat. (If you want to help out as a volunteer in any capacity, please do! There will be more web site opportunities too and I’ll be talking about those at the end.)

The objective here, then, has four facets. Remember, this was approached with guerrilla web redesign tactics:

  1. Audit the content for relevance and redundancy (getting rid of what failed in each case.)
  2. Separate good content into more logical groups and better reflecting that organization in the new architecture and primary navigation.
  3. Establish publishing channels, including content type/scope and authoring roles/responsibilities and access; even bring in new people to leverage roles and hopefully take site to a new level.
  4. Produce documentation that describes it all — a written strategy and it’s various component artifacts.

Without a doubt this is still work in progress, particularly the last two items in the list, but we are already a big step there with refining content, improving architecture, and using a more intuitive publishing engine.

Incorporation of Social Tools

Social media is increasingly used by web denizens everywhere, and that’s no different with STC members. What we decided was to select a few key channels that would benefit members already using those channels, and perhaps provide more exposure (thus growth) to the chapter in general. We feel this has a side benefit too, by using social media channels that are already popular, we don’t have to re-invent the wheel in the CMS itself and thus keep overhead to a minimum. For the moment you’ll see social media slipping in at two locations.

First is the Google Calendar we are using to record and display France Chapter events in context to our site. The upside of this is it’s easy to implement (a simple Iframe snippet of code) and chapter members who already use Google Calendars can now more easily add ours to their own, or any of the particular events we post. The downside is we have little control over the Google calendar’s presentation. Textpattern does have a sophisticated Calendar plugin that we could have used, and it’s possible we might like to use it in the future, but for now we’ll see how it goes with the hosted calendar solution.

The other indication of social media use is with our social real estate listing in the footer of the site. I hope most of them look familiar to you, even if you don’t have accounts. These are new to STC France and yet to be put into full swing. We need to learn and evaluate how to take full advantage of them, which is a hot topic on the web right now and you might expect to see us write more about it as we learn from our own experimentation. Of course these are not integrated, per se, but they can be, and some will be and I discuss that a bit more later.

A Stronger Sense of Brand

Needless to say, the previous site had no brand to speak of. The logo was the STC logo itself, and the presentation was nothing but a Drupal theme that probably thousands of other Drupal sites on the web were using too.

Web site before and after screen shots.

In the new site we’ve gone some distance at fleshing out a new brand, but I would admit we have a ways to go yet. Some of the things I took into consideration were the Chapter’s geography, national colors, cultural symbols and so forth. Hopefully you recognize this a bit and it’s not a total failure. What I do think needs attention (and which will get attention via a nice collaborative plan I have in the works) is the creation of a new France Chapter logo. Something professional grade and long-lasting. This will eventually take the place of the white “STC France Chapter” text that serves as the logo currently. For all the hats I sometimes wear, that of graphic artist is not in the repertoire.

Looking Ahead

I’ve hinted to some of the functional changes and publishing structure we yet hope to put in place. Here’s a closer look at them.

Link Resources?

If you’re looking for the link resources that were in the previous site, they are coming back, we just have not had a chance to rebuild that yet with the rush to launch before the Annual Conference 2009.

More Social Media Integration

Besides Google calendar, we’ll be looking to integrate the site with some of our other social real estate. In particular, we should see integration of Facebook and Flickr.

Integration with Facebook is made easy with Facebook’s new Connect technology. Check out this great Facebook Connect demonstration from the Facebook developers about how to do it and why it might be a good idea.

With Flickr it’s no mystery. It’s a place to store, manage, and socialize over photographs, and everybody likes photographs (if they’re interesting). As with all great social media, Flickr provides the ability to integrate a “Flickr stream” in your web site; kind of a recent albums thing that brings the albums in context to site visitors. We’re going to do that, and it will be on the home page at some point.

One increasingly popular social tool we don’t make use of yet, and which I think we should, is Twitter. Twitter accounts can be setup so they function as co-author accounts. This is great for organizational situations like STC communities, to name just one. The co-authoring process is made possible by a great Twitter app called CoTweet, which as their slogan says is for “powering your brand on Twitter.” Twitter is proving to be an increasingly important social channel for legitimate business, from entrepreneurship to high government and everything in between. It’s an effective viral and inbound marketing channel, bringing users to your content rather than pushing content out. The campaign team of US President Barak Obama skillfully used social media, like Facebook and Twitter, to reach millions of people like no presidential runners had ever before. There is power to tap there. You need to learn how to do it! Twitter streams can be integrated in a web site. Just like you would have a list of previous blog articles, you can have a stream of recent micro-blog articles too, from Twitter. But that’s not where the real power of Twitter is. Twitter is like your scout in the field; doing work and sending visitors back to home base.

Cross-linking social real estate channels should not be underestimated either. In other words, in addition to bridging the web site with the various social channels, as fitting, it’s also effective to provide links between the channels themselves, and there’s various methods and tricks for doing this. All-in-all it helps open up multiple pathways so that surfers may find their way to the site under different contexts and locations.

Member Sign-in for Member-only Resources

The idea of a members-only area comes up a lot in context with virtual communities. Usually it comes up in the form of arguments about whether members-only areas are actually a good thing or not. I’m a firm believer they are not a good idea for STC communities, but that’s just my belief and not a policy the France Chapter specifically supports. I don’t believe in locking content away because most STC communities are struggling to get member eyes at all. If you go locking away all the good content (and it better be great content), who’s going to see it? If nobody sees it, it’s not doing your site or community any good.

Openness and excellent content is the way to success. That’s a hard one for many to take-in or accept, but it’s true. Again, my own humble opinion, but the only STC web site that should have a member log-in area is the stc.org headquarters site itself. All community sites should be doing whatever they can to gain new members, and openness has a funny way of defying the odds and doing that.

Besides, there are other ways of containing content for member eyes, and this is where communities should be exploring social channels, which provide such “members-only” mechanisms in one form or another. For example to get into our Ning community you must be approved after initial request. Facebook functions similarly. Twitter accounts can be set so following is by approval as well. Flickr albums can be private. And so forth.

Regardless of how I feel about it all, I will respect what the France Chapter Board wants to do, and that might mean implementing a members-only area in the future. I can’t imagine what will be in there yet except perhaps job postings will be locked away and a login required to see them. Maybe we can figure out a way to use one of our social channels to handle member-only job postings, or maybe we just keep them open and become the beacon in France for people looking for Technical Communication-related jobs.

Web Management Changes

Two areas that will have 100% of my attention from here forward, and which encompasses everything I’ve talked about so far and more, are the development of a web content strategy and putting a collaborative team in place to make that strategy a success.

A Detailed Content Strategy

What I’m talking about here is a written plan for the France Chapter team that details:

  • who the site is communicating to (audience types),
  • what channels of content map to the specific audiences,
  • authoring roles and rights of access,
  • copy editing guidelines,
  • style guide,
  • graphics guide, and maybe (if we’re ambitious)
  • a publishing time-line.

That’s a lot to detail, and it’s not even a comprehensive strategy. But it’s certainly strategy enough for our purposes, and should we successfully get it into place, we should (theoretically) see the quality of this site’s content improve and our readership grow. That’s the idea, anyway.

However, part of making this strategy work means leveraging the human-side of the strategy.

Additional Web Team Roles for France Chapter Members

New web roles need defined and filled to complete the content strategy; effectively, a small web team.

The days of a single webmaster to do it all are gone. A lot of operations in domains like government, non-profit and public service have not realized this yet, but they need to, and quickly. Any business or organization that provides services (survives via clients and members) and relies on a single person to keep the web site targeted and on track is putting their web site in jeopardy — plain and simple. There a several arguments that can be made why this is the case, here are three:

  1. Perspective: When a single person is not only in charge, but doing everything for a web site to, there’s a tendency — indirect or not — for that person to steer the site in a direction of their own manner, unchecked. This might influence the kinds of functionality added, copy written, time-line of when things get done, etc. This isn’t always bad; sometimes the person in charge, doing all the work, is in that position for a good reason. But even experienced web folk need to realize there are many hats needing worn to make a great site and keep it that way over time. Pride should not get it the way for the greater good of the site, hence business.
  2. Leverage: (Or the antithesis — burnout.) Since there are multiple hats needing worn to run a great site, it’s important to try and fill them because the lowly webmaster may burnout under the stress/obligation of keeping a tight ship around the clock (and certainly they will try if they’re worthwhile in the role). If a web site is not much to write home about, this is less important, but if the site has respectable aims, a content strategy to go with them, and is even seeing the benefit of the effort (better content and a growing readership), then it is all the more important to define different roles/responsibilities and put additional people in place to address them.
  3. Opportunity: Keeping site perspective and leverage in mind creates opportunity for other people. In turn, not only is the bottom line supported (the strategy and the goals of the strategy), but it promotes healthy generation of new ideas and forward thinking, camaraderie (potentially even being fun), and gives an impression to readership the operation is serious and professional.

Understanding all this and being new to the France Chapter, I want to put these arguments into practice. The ideas have been pitched to the President, and I’ve been given a green light to make it happen. As a fair start, and since I am the creator of the new site, I’ve been promoted to the status of Web Manager. It will be my responsibility to develop the artifacts of the content strategy define new web roles, conduct the recruiting, and manage the web operations over time. That is an initial burden, but it’s one I’m willing to take on, and it should leverage out and pay off later when the strategy is documented and roles are filled.

Following is an initial idea of the roles I have in mind. It’s subject to change as more of the strategy is established. I won’t comment on the responsibilities yet outside of what the titles imply as there are still a few decisions to make with the board and thereafter much foundation to lay. The initial roles being considered are:

  • Site Manager (filled)
  • Translators
  • Copy Editor(s)
  • Copy Writers / Contributing Authors
  • Graphic Designer
  • Front-end (web standards) Developer

What this list is really meant to do, for now, is inform you that I’ll be looking for others who have an interest in joining the web team. The door is open now for you to express your interest (select the Web Site option from the Nature of your inquiry field). When writing, please provide some basic details about yourself, including your membership status, your relevant skills and the first two roles you’re interested in filling.

There’s only two weighting factors to keep in mind. First, I’d rather not see volunteers who are already France Chapter volunteers, particularly board members who should have enough to worry about already. This isn’t a firm rule, but if we can get new interest in the new opportunities, that would be preferred. Second, it is the France Chapter’s interest to get students more involved with our activities. Though not all roles are expected to be filled by students, students are especially encouraged to get in touch. This will be a great opportunity for students on many levels.

Thanks for hanging in there.