I have been developing enterprise-level content management systems since 2001, particularly at the BBC (where I was a key member of the team developing DNA, the BBC's proprietary CMS), the Victoria and Albert Museum (whose website is produced by the Rhythmyx CMS from Percussion Software), and Which? (who also use Rhythmyx). I have done everything from designing workflows for non-technical users to building sophisticated web templates using XML, XSL and Velocity. I am particularly proficient in using Rhythmyx to produce large-scale websites. In particular, my CMS skills include the following:
-
Template Design: I have coded a very large number of XSL and Velocity templates in both Rhythmyx and DNA. I wrote templates for the BBC's DNA Hub, the V&A website, the Museum of Childhood website, and the Which? website. Not only did I code XSL and Velocity to produce XHTML pages, I also wrote templates to produce PHP, JavaScript and XML.
-
Accessibility: When I joined the V&A, the code used to produce the V&A's website was in a terrible state; it worked only in Internet Explorer and failed to meet any W3C WCAG 1.0 accessibility checkpoints. I went through over 250 XSL templates in the CMS and recoded them to be standards-compliant. The result was a site that met the UK government's accessibility requirements for the first time in its existence.
-
Workflows: I designed content workflows for the V&A that needed to be flexible enough to cater for the curatorial departments to which the CMS was rolled out. The final workflow contained seven statuses, with a number of manual and automatic state transitions, and four email notification triggers.
-
Roles: I created a matrix of user roles that enabled the V&A to restrict content access to those with the relevant permissions. This meant, for example, that authors could create content and submit it to be approved, from which point they could follow its progress, but no longer edit it. Meanwhile, approvers would only see content that they could approve, thus streamlining their CMS in-boxes.
-
User Interface: I designed a consistent and simple user interface for end users of the V&A's CMS, implementing WYSIWYG content editors, jargon-free naming conventions and menu structures, logical building blocks for easy page construction, and the Rhythmyx Express Portal (a simple, HTML-only interface to the CMS, tailored for non-technical users).
-
Tidy Development: The CMS I inherited at the V&A was a mess. It didn't use any naming conventions, either behind the scenes or in the public-facing interface, and the guts of the CMS were littered with temporary files, old versions, corrupted database tables and all manner of digital refuse. I went through the whole system with a fine toothcomb, removing obsolete data and making everything consistent. The resulting system was considerably more stable, smoother for developers, simpler to upgrade, and generally much easier to understand. I did a similar job for Which?, when I worked with an extremely complex intallation and reworked it in a much simpler and more structured fashion.
In summary, I am a power user of enterprise-level content management systems, from coding complex templates in XSL and Velocity to designing simple but effective user interfaces.
