Asbury Seminary Relaunch v2

May 31, 2007

I am proud to announce the relaunch of Asbury Seminary’s website. For the most part you might not notice a difference between this edition and the previous; it would be absolutely okay if you didn’t. However, there are some features that I’m pretty excited about that I thought I would mention.

This relaunch was obviously about functionality and not aesthetics. When I signed on as the Visual Media Developer for Asbury Seminary we brainstormed about the future of the website. The first step came in December when we relaunched the site with a PHP driven foundation. The PHP base allowed us to make changes across the website faster than ever because it relied on a small number of files and the content was broken down in manageable pieces. Today, that changed again, this time we are using a Content Management System as our foundation.

About the CMS

For those who might not know what a Content Management System is, a CMS is a piece of software that attempts to make your life easier. It holds your content in a database and displays it for you when the user requests it. It allows you to separate the information on your website from the website itself. You could change the structure of the website, the look, all the imagery etc. and your content would stay intact and separate from all the other pieces.

There are so many choices you have to make when dealing with a CMS. Many people have interjected comments about which they would have chosen for Asbury Seminary but I’m happy that we went a little bit off the normal path.

This particular CMS was created by the web guys at Asbury College, Rich Bowen and Chris J. Davis. It’s a beautiful piece of software and with a little modification it fit nicely into the academic framework that we already had in place. The major strength that I can see at this point is that it links into our active directory server and allows our users to login to the website with the same user name and password they would have used elsewhere on our network. Once logged in I can assign them a role and they can begin their editing.

The roles are well defined and I can choose which section of the website a person can administer, publish or draft. Of course as with most content management systems those users can travel anywhere in the world and update their section of the website without having to FTP files or go to other great lengths to access their work; all they need is a modern web browser.

News RSS Feed

I’m also thrilled about the fact that we can syndicate our news to anyone who wishes to subscribe. This is accomplished by using RSS, Really Simple Syndication. All a person needs to do is download a RSS reader (such as Thunderbird) and begin receiving the news as it happens.

404 What?

Typically when I go to a website using a bad link, maybe through an out of date bookmark, I get a “404 page not found error” or a generic “oops” message. Though I understand that this symbolizes that the page has been moved, it’s still annoying. One of the nice features that comes with this website is that 404s are almost non-existent. Obviously you can still find them if you really try, but if you were looking for a page in a certain section and misspelled the name of the page or added in the wrong ending it would still get you to the first page of that section.

That might not seem like a big deal but to me it’s significant. If I land on a 404 page I either have to hit the back button and figure out what went wrong or I have to clip out the last bit of the URL and hope I can guess the root page of the section. This CMS does that for you, if you have a bad link or if you guess the wrong title it will simply takes you to the beginning of the section.

Conclusion

I could go on about the features of the CMS but I won’t get too web-geeky. I believe that this represents a major move for web technology at Asbury Theological Seminary and I look forward to many future additions in the areas of usability and functionality. If these features aren’t enough for you, just wait and see what we have coming in the next year.

| | |