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The Smeal College of Business recently redesigned their Web site using WebLion, Information Technology Services' (ITS) Web content management solution. While a Web site redesign is a complicated and time-consuming project, Smeal College staff found that using WebLion made the process quite efficient for such a complex job.
WebLion is an open-source Web content management system and is built on a foundation consisting of the Zope application framework and the Plone content management system. Zope and Plone are open-source software products, which mean that the software code is accessible to a Penn State Web developer for free. This enables the Web developer to customize the software to specific needs.
WebLion enables Penn State entities such as Smeal College to maintain their Web sites in a more effective and efficient manner, even with staff who may not have a lot of technology expertise. "Most Web sites are built by hand by people who have a great deal of technical knowledge of HTML and other Web site technologies," said Christian Vinten-Johansen, database administrator/Webmaster and co-manager of the WebLion project. "WebLion allows you to create content, such as writing articles and adding events to a site calendar, without needing such technical expertise."
Mike Halm, senior strategist and manager of special projects, is the co-manager of the WebLion project with Vinten-Johansen and adds that WebLion enables a department to offer a more up-to-date Web site. "WebLion helps developers and Webmasters avoid the 'Webmaster bottleneck', which is everything going through a single person to get it live on the Internet," Halm said. "In this model, different people can contribute content without one person holding up the process. It allows for site updates as often as needed and as quickly as possible."
This sort of efficiency was exactly what Smeal College needed, given the Web site redesign's challenges. They were faced with a redesign of a site that included more than 8,000 objects in an entirely file-based environment. The first challenge was to move all of that into a Zope environment, which thanks to WebLion and the efforts of the Smeal College Web staff took only two months. Guy Heckman, programmer/analyst with the Research, Instruction, and Information Technology (RIIT) Group at Smeal College, said that along with creating an efficient process, WebLion allowed the Smeal Web staff to move all these Web objects without user interruption or inconvenience. "It was a very good job of looking like the old site," Heckman said. "Unless you were aware of something going on, you never noticed the difference."
The next phase was the actual redesign. Heckman said they started in August and the redesign phase also lasted two months, enabling them to meet deadlines and roll out the new site October 28. "The new site was very well received," he said. "All-in-all, it was an easier process than it normally would be because we already had all of the content in Zope. WebLion just made the entire thing from start to finish so much easier."
Heckman said that the effort went so well it is getting some acknowledgement outside of Penn State. "I can't say enough about how instrumental WebLion was to what we achieved at Smeal College," he said. "It is getting to the point where we are getting national recognition — a national higher education technology magazine is interested in doing an article on us and the project."
Along with using WebLion, Smeal College is a partner with ITS for the WebLion project, along with the College of Education, the College of Information Sciences and Technology, the Department of Chemistry, the Eberly College of Science, and the Social Science Research Institute. Smeal College also works with a growing community of Zope and Plone users at Penn State. This community is part of the WebLion project and has regular meetings, something that Heckman found especially valuable.
"I think WebLion's working philosophy is great. It's a very rapid development cycle, and there is a lot of give and take among the members at the meetings," Heckman said. "You always come out of the meetings knowing more than you did going in."
This process is one of the main reasons that Heckman finds WebLion superior to many commercial Web content management systems. "A product is only as good as the support and the information you can gather on it. As far as commercial content management systems, I have heard things about trying to find more information about them that weren't very positive," he said. "The content management system companies won't let you learn more about intricate parts of their product because they are trade secrets. You either have to contract with them to get something to work the way you want it to or you have to make do."
"There are no secret areas with WebLion, it's all there and out in the open," Heckman added.
The combination of product and interaction and support among other Web developers makes WebLion something that Heckman highly recommends. "If you need a content management system, or you have a Web site that is out of control and you need to rope it in," he said. "I would, without a doubt, go with WebLion."
For more information on getting started with WebLion and how to join the WebLion community, go to http://weblion.psu.edu.
