I’ve been spending time lately culling through a variety of plugins for WordPress to offer clients who want to beef up their CMS capabilities. I came across three recently that I find particularly useful.

The first is Flickr Photo Gallery. The toolbar integrates nicely with the image upload component in the writing window of WordPress. Once configured, rather than just selecting from images I have uploaded to my blog site, I can also select images from my photos on Flickr. I can add individual photos or whole albums. Once on a published page, I can view them in their own window with navigation, or go right over to Flickr and use their viewing tools. This is a great solution for companies who want to display images (say a recent event they sponsored) without the overhead of managing their own image library application.

The second is Viper’s Video Quicktags. I’m not sure why, but I found it very difficult to embed a YouTube video into my blog. I found lots of sites offering code that required cutting and pasting into the code view of the editing window. None of these worked for me. Finally, I stumbled on this plugin, which like the Flickr plugin, offers a solution nicely integrated into my editing toolbar. And it could not be simpler: press the icon and a window prompt pops up requesting the URL of the video. Press OK and the code is inserted to your posting. It works with all the major sites like YouTube, Google Video, IFilm, and more. And like the Flickr tool above, this also provides a business solution of linking to content without having to own and manage the content system itself.

There is one other plugin that I think is truly invaluable. The All in One SEO Pack. This form below the editing window ensures that every post I make has the required metadata to keep the search engines a-calling. There are also lots of other options in the admin interface. This is a must have, while the others are just good to have.

written by Christopher Murray

Many months ago (perhaps even two years ago) I installed the WordPress multi-user package on my development host. Within minutes, I abandoned it. I can’t recall now what the issue was, but I do remember thinking to myself that if it is this broken just trying to get the thing up and running, it isn’t yet ready for prime time (or my debugging time, either).

But yesterday, imagine my surprise when after downloading, unpacking, and installing I found myself tricking out a fresh instance of WordPress Mu (the Mu is actually a symbol rather than letters on their site). I went out and found some very nice themes; one three-column setup that I am particularly enamored with, and began customizing and exploring the new features.

Why am I bothering with this? Because WordPress in an of itself is a simple but powerful content management system. It can be tailored for almost any kind of site (newspapers, universities, any kind of blog), and makes it very easy for writers and editors to publish and own their own content. It also integrates well with other open-source tools, like vBulletin. And now, having this multi-user version, we can literally host hundreds of blogs using the same WordPress instance. Imagine a company with several brands or locations that wants to have their sites all look and behave similarly but also wants each to manage their own content. This kind of flexibility (and centralization) is a huge step in providing that kind of control. I’ll be spending a lot of time with this system in the coming months.

written by Christopher Murray \\ tags: cms, multiuser, wordpress

Many companies do not have an information management strategy, or if they do, it usually lacks the focus required to truly add value to the organization. If your strategy is predicated on the notion that Information Management is merely a cost rather than an investment, then you likely see no return. If you do consider it an investment, and treat it as such– supplying resources and being vigilant in your processes–your business can reap huge rewards.

A true strategy begins with a corporate mandate on how and where documents are to be stored. In more complex organizations, such as engineering or scientific companies, a corporate librarian or archivist acts as gatekeeper; all documentation to be checked-in goes through this person who ensure propers tagging and metadata. This system also requires constant checks and balances to ensure that documents are maintained with consistency.

Getting to this point is not a simple shift in thinking or a quick fix. In fact, the initial audit to create a more robust information management infrastructure can be time consuming and even frustrating. In order to discover the extent of your information, you must perform a lengthy process of discovery. Going through all of the shared folders and rogue websites and other corporate artifacts can indeed be overwhelming. But in order to achieve a level of information management where that data becomes useful this process must occur. This process is best broken down, either by department, or by types of documents, or even by starting with those areas that seem more organized than others (this last approach may also help to not frighten you off too early in the game).

Once you have identified and categorized the full breath of the data, you must then begin to think of how you want to use that data. It might be tempting to go ahead and try to find a new product at this point and just start jamming all that old data into it; but in time you will have nothing better than where you came from. You must first take a hard look at the types of data you have, where they come from, how they relate, what their commonalities are, and how might you want to bring them together in a useful way in the future. You also must begin to consider and development things like metadata and taxonomy.

From here you can begin to consider tools and possible structures for capturing and storing this data. Cost certainly is going to drive this discussion; but it is worth looking at a variety of offerings even if they are out of your price range to give you ideas of the kind of things you may or may not want in your new CMS.

Putting structure around your data is critical. Metadata is a good place to start. Taxonomy is hugely valuable as well. I recall recently having a discussion with a group of people and trying to explain to them the value of taxonomy. It was hard for them to get past the notion of just keywords and directory structures (and the jokes about stuffing animals). What really threw them was that with a proper taxonomy, you could conceivably drop all of your documents (and I mean all of them) into one folder in your CMS. (You would not want to do this, of course, because for the people who are managing the content and checking in documents this would be a difficult way to see and use the data.) But the fact is that if everything is properly tagged within the taxonomy, you can use search to find anything you want. In fact, at that level you can employ a facetted search, which simply means that you can pick the area of the taxonomy you wish to search specifically (for example, products -> hardware -> printers).

Information Management is not just a phrase that means you have information and places to put it. It implies that there exists a strategy for identifying, categorizing, tagging, retrieving, and aggregating that data. It means that you have recognized that data as an investment that can return valuable information more consistently and efficiently, which can in turn create opportunities and drive your business goals.

written by Christopher Murray \\ tags: information management cms taxonomy