Differentiation – Content Screencast
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Differentiation – Content – Blogging Screencast
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Differentiation – Content – Roles Screencast
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Content Management
Drupal is a highly regarded application for creating large and/or complex sites edited and managed by many users with content that can be organized by hierarchical menus as well as by categories, keywords or tags. Drupal adopts some of the innovations of wikis and blogs. In particular, one of its core content types is the story, which is modeled on the blog post and can be easily configured to be displayed in reverse chronological order. Drupal can also be set up as a wiki but requires many additional modules and customization (see: Wikis in Drupal 6 – Module Review ). Confluence is referred to as an enterprise wiki system that includes blogging capabilities. Segue also has blogging and wiki capabilities.
WordPress and MediaWiki allow for tagging or categorization of content but do not support the creation of content hierarchies and hierarchical menus. Segue, Drupal and Confluence can be distinguished from most blogging and wiki applications in that they all support hierarchies of content and provide tools for mapping these to navigation menus.
Segue has an innovative content rendering engine, that allows users to control the layout and flow of content on their site. Most web content management systems allow content to be laid out in a variety of ways through the use of templates. Usually templates consist of some sort of formatting specifications defined in a mark-up language such as html and css or xslt. Most systems use templates both to define the layout of content, as well as its theming or "look and feel." Most systems including WordPress, Drupal and Confluence, do not allow non-system administrators to edit these templates.
In Segue, the theming of content is defined independently of it’s layout and both can be customized by site owners. Segue renders content more like a portal or personal page aggregator (e.g. iGoogle, Netvibes) than like a blog or wiki. This means that users can rearrange the content on their site without needing to edit template files. Web-based aggregators were amongst the first web applications to popularize drag and drop re-arranging of content blocks using AJAX coding techniques. Other content management systems are beginning to offer similar types of functionality. Drupal recently added drag and drop layout management to it Panels module. Aggregators once limited to three column layouts are now introducing additional layout possibilities.
Segue allows users to define their own layout containers (most systems currently only allow users to choose predefined layouts). While most systems support the drag and drop arrangement of single content blocks/modules/widgets, Segue supports the rearrangement of hierarchies of content and the nesting of layout containers. This means that a Segue site can have a section with a layout container that defines a sidebar that is displayed on every page within that section and also define additional layout containers for each page, some of which may have their own sidebars or "sticky blocks" (these are content blocks that are configured to always remain at the top of a list, for example see: Too many "Sticky at top of lists"? Put ’em into a rotation.)
In addition to layout containers, a common UI component of portals and aggregators, Segue also has containers for pages and content. Most portals and aggregators create any number of "pages" each of which may have its own layout. Since Segue supports hierarchies of content, it is possible to have groups of pages (i.e. sections). Pages containers define default settings for all pages and content within that container. Content containers define default settings for content blocks they contain. Segue allows users to define usual settings such as sort order, whether or not to display content author and editor names, creation and modification dates, revision history as well as whether or not to enable discussion.
Important Segue container settings that many web content management systems do not expose in their UI’s are "flow" and "layout" specifications for navigation links and content blocks. The navigation on most sites consists of a row of links below the header of the site and/or a column of links on the left or right side of the site. Users can define a column of navigation links in Segue simply be setting the pages container flow to be "top to bottom". Users can change this "column" of links to a "row" of links simply be changing the flow from "top to bottom" to "left to right." Users can also define a grid of cells to display thumbnail images by setting the "layout" of a content container to use 3 or more columns and 3 or more rows (additional content is automatically paginated).