Edusites Ltd Project Brief 4.11.2008
Overview
Edusites create subject-specific educational websites which support teachers and students. Our pilot site was http://www.mediaedu.co.uk which is now the leading Media Studies support site in the UK. This site was built using RapidWeaver – a web design tool that allows non-web designers to create visually impressive and feature rich websites rapidly. We are creating an English site to support English teachers and their students. Teachers and students subscribe to these edusites and this is currently how we generate our income.
We would like to move forwards by building our Edusites on a more stable and flexible platform that allows normal people to develop striking web content using a series of accessible and clear GUIs. RapidWeaver has been an excellent tool for us in the past but it cannot cope with sites with a large amount of content and it is limited by the fact that only one person can create pages and administrate the site at one time.
We are looking for a CMS which will cope with large quantities of multi-media content: text, images, audio, video, animation along with an infrastructure which manages our user databases, subscriptions, access and other administrative systems.
In addition to RapidWeaver, we use a PHP subscription system, a PayPal payment gateway and a PHP emailing system for marketing and client updates.
Here’s a login to Mediaedu.co.uk – our main educational website:
[url] http://www.mediaedu.co.uk
[username] pepperdigital
[password] edusites
We aren’t sure which CMS would be most applicable to our project and need some advice.
Main Concerns
• How do we manage the migration from RapidWeaver to the new CMS in a feasible way? Our sites tend to have thousands of pages and assets.
• We are concerned about losing functionality for individual authors such as creating image and video shadowboxes, navigation menus, collages and thumbnail links with rounded ‘Apple’ style corners via the in-built GUI in RapidWeaver. For instance, if an author wants to embed a video clip in to a page, can they do this through a GUI?
• We need multiple authors to be able to create new areas on the site and then edit these online. This will enable the company to develop more rapidly and more efficiently.
• When we receive copy (e.g. a large article on a topic) it needs reformatting and breaking up to suit web browsing. At present we do this by adding in page navigation functionality using collages and sliders, etc. Would a non-html fluent author be able to work around this in a CMS?
• We are developing a new PHP-based multi-site support & multi-site subscription management tool that needs to work with the CMS we select. We are developing one management system for all our sites and clients, not one per site.
If you think you can provide us with some constructive advice - please get in touch.
Kind regards, Richard Gent
Edusites Ltd
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