CMS Interview

My interviewee is a Library Systems Developer at a public university in Kansas. We corresponded via e-mail and they were able to provide some very insightful answers for this assignment. Her library uses Joomla! and, unsurprisingly, she cites ease of use as a major factor in deciding on a CMS because among the people contributing content there is a wide variety of skill levels. In my personal experience with Joomla! this is understandable: unskilled users can still navigate the system and contribute, but more advanced users have a wide variety of options at their disposal.

Here is the interview:

•       How and where did you hear about CMS?

I think the basic concept has been around for longer than the term ‘CMS’, so our knowledge probably came from existing homegrown database-driven websites. In a way an integrated library system is like a CMS, and our library has been using those for decades.




•       What were your motivations to adopt CMS for its use (library website or any other purpose)

Our university was switching to a CMS for all campus webpages. It’s a proprietary system, and is very limited in scope. It was really designed for department assistants to put text, pictures, and links in webpages for academic or support departments on campus. It didn’t meet the needs of the library, so we looked for an alternative system. We had to go through many channels to get approval to use something else, and had to list many reasons why the university CMS wouldn’t work for us (which included our need to add widgets/search boxes/dynamic content to the page). Eventually the university CIO gave us permission, and we proceeded from there.


•       What were your decision making criteria? and What is the name of CMS used?

We needed something that was easy to use. We have over a dozen people in the library adding and updating content on the website, and their skill level ranges from coding experts to not confident at all. We looked closely at both Joomla and Drupal, and decided that they both had pros and cons. Drupal has a larger community of library users, and is very extendable, but we felt Joomla had a more intuitive backend for the staff.




•       What are the important benefits or advantages of a particular CMS  over an old system or another CMS system you've used in the past?

We hadn’t previously used a CMS for our website. There are many advantages over our old system (which was static HTML pages). It provides a template, so that out webpages have a cohesive look, and we can update the template (such as changing the header) in one place, and it changes on all pages. It evens out the skill-level issues we had previously. Joomla also offers a large developer community, and lots of extensions to plug in and use (such as calendar widgets, dynamic library hours, Twitter feeds, etc.) that we don’t have to code ourselves.


•       How was the learning curve?

The learning curve depended on the user. Most people were able to use Joomla with only a single 45 minute training session, for basic users. I’m the administrator, and it took a few weeks to get comfortable with the server directories, and re-coding some modules to work better for our library.