INFORMATION FOR...

EdWebs:  The College of Education’s Web Publishing System

Ryan Thomas.  Associate Director of Information Technologies, College of Education

October 27th  Noon. 

Room 126 GSLIS.  501 E. Daniel St.

Summary:

In 2002 the College of Education began the effort of redesigning its web site and the programming architecture behind it. EdWebs is the name we've given the new web publishing system developed during this project.  With the help of Macromedia's Contribute web publishing tool, content editing is now in the hands of departmental staff.  What makes EdWebs more than just a Contribute solution, however is a locally developed web application -- a templating system using XML, XSL, XHTML, and CSS. This templating system allowed us to unify the look and navigation of the site throughout "official" college sites including academic departments and to add a number of features which could not be achieved with static html files.

By combining a home grown web application with an off the shelf web editing tool we've given our users a high quality, well documented, commercially active, GUI web page editor that is tied into our dynamic data and implements an inheritable set of page and site properties and menus.

The purpose of the brownbag is to illustrate the benefits of the design and to give a general idea of how the solution works.

Example of Tool in Use:

http://www.ed.uiuc.edu

Features:

  • inheritable site and page properties such as contact information and banner graphics
  • GUI interface for editing web pages based on html templates
  • Hooks to disparate data sources such as SQL data and UIUC Web services data
  • Dynamically generated bread crumbs/path bar
  • inheritable javascript menus
  • browser detection to implement higher levels of CSS and javacript on newer browsers.
  • xslt driven html templates for easy modification of final html templates.

Intended Audience and Skill Level:

Web site administrators and authors.  While knowledge of XML, XSL, and other technologies will be helpful, the goal of the talk is to illustrate the overall design and implementation rather than the details.

Deliverables:

  • rationale for design
  • overview of architecture, workflow, and application features
  • screen shots of user web editing interface
  • sample xml, xslt, and html documents.

Tools Used:

  • ASP
  • IIS Web Server
  • XML
  • XSL
  • Microsoft COM

Additional Resources: