Agriculture Information Technology

Advisory Group (AITAG)

Ag IT Advisory Group – 8:30 a.m. CST, Thursday, Nov. 16, 2006

Langdon – Randy Mehlhoff
Grand Forks – Margaret Tweten
Williston – Gordy Bradbury
Valley City – Randy Grueneich
NDSU – Kristine Hargiss, Jim Hammond, Rosi Kloberdanz, Les Backer Vern Anderson, Joe Kramer, Becky Koch
Guests – Marc Wallman, Jill Anderson and Robby Njos, ITS; Roger Egeberg, Ag Communication

Marc Wallman described that a content management system (CMS) separates the design from the content in Web page development. ITS determined criteria, evaluated four systems and selected TYPO3 open-source software. He said a CMS makes it easier to manage Web pages since the administrators determine the “template” look. The CMS automatically makes pages ADA compliant, and content is inputted once rather than duplicated for various Web pages.

Multiple authors can work together on Web page development, and administrators determine who must review and who can publish pages. Since the work is completed online, no software is required for the authors. ITS keeps the TYPO3 up-to-date, and ITS trainers are getting up to speed to start training users-

The ITS Web page that’s now live at http://www.its.ndsu.edu/ is in the CMS, and University Relations and Student Affairs are about to go live. ITS worked with University Relations on the design that provides the consistent marketing look wanted for the university. Dave Haasser is following a similar design for new Ag home pages he develops.

But CMS isn’t a catch-all and isn’t appropriate for programming and interactivity. ITS is still developing support and training. It’s a lot of work to move Web pages to the CMS, but Jill is debugging the copy and paste feature. Rosi said when ITS moved its 1,200 or so pages, many “dead wood” pages were eliminated.

TYPO3 has search options and can create a site map automatically. Photos, tables and other graphics can be tagged with specific text. The print version excludes navigation and other non-content segments.

Randy M. said the CMS seemed to meet the AITAG charge to provide more consistency with Agriculture and University Extension Web pages, but Jim said the charge was to provide input on Ag’s Web presence, not necessarily consistency. Randy said consistent navigation and look would improve the Web presence.

Roger said he thinks Ag should review some pages in the CMS to see how they work before moving forward and would like an estimate of how much it would cost, primarily in staff time, to convert pages.  Rosi said Web pages need to continually be reviewed and updated, so the CMS would help cause that to happen more. Dave Rice has been involved in two CMS demonstrations with ITS and needs to continue to be included in the discussion.

Randy G. said county Extension office Web pages need a more consistent look and that users want consistency, especially in navigation. Margaret said eXtension is providing a uniform look nationally, but when users click on the link to North Dakota county pages, that consistent look is gone. Vern said the CMS would provide ADA compliance and image uniformity.

Programmed sites that don’t go into the CMS would probably remain where they are but may eventually migrate to another server if units don’t have much on their server after converting many pages to CMS.

Joe said the Association of Counties has studied CMS, and many counties are going with a system that caters to local government. He said TYPO3 looked more robust but not too difficult.

Becky pointed out that the five main Ag and University Extension pages (VP, Research, Extension, College and information), departments, RECs and county Extension offices would be the easiest to put into the CMS and that interactive sites like NDAWN are at the other end of the continuum so may never be in the CMS. Rosi said the university’s goal has been for the first three levels of Web pages to have a similar look, but not necessarily down to the individual faculty level.

Jim said that the CMS should be optional for Ag units and that if it’s a better product, people will go to it. Rosi said eventually ITS only will provide training in TYPO3 and not support Dreamweaver and Contribute.

Randy M. suggested AITAG members think about the CMS, ask their colleagues about the concept and develop more questions before the group makes a recommendation for Ag Administration at the next AITAG meeting, which will probably be Dec. 14.

After the meeting adjourned, someone wanted to make sure URLs wouldn’t change, and someone else pointed out that CMS provides a much simpler and secure ftp process.

Submitted by Becky Koch

Return to Ag IT Advisory Group Home
Go to NDSU Agriculture Policy Statements