Technical solution for content management

[linahanner]

As a Content Manager
I want to easily manage the content of the website
So that I can update content which has become irrelevant, provide our users with new interesting information and easily create new pages

I have had the opportunity to look at the current solution for the website. On each page, a content manager has the ability to change the html of the body of the page, creating a dependency for knowledge of HTML to anyone wanting to manage the website.

Current Suggestions:

• WordPress
• Jekyll
• Custom

I think this is an important decision, as migrating to another technology down the line will most likely be very time consuming and for that reason I wish to take our time on this solution and weigh our options.

What are the factors to consider in making this decision?

• Usability
• Extendability
• Ease of development

[karlbeecken]

Pros for Jekyll:

• Easy to edit and create new pages (see prose.io)
• Features Markdown, which has many WYSIWYG editors
• Easy to customize for developers
• Easy to deploy with GitHub Pages

[linahanner]

@karlbeecken I am also leaning towards Jekyll at the moment. But I have two concerns.

While I think Markdown is easy to learn and use, I am concerned that Git might not be. One solution is to let people directly change files on the server, but that seems less than ideal as there would be no version control of the changes being made. Perhaps there are people who have conjured up brilliant solutions to circumvent this issue 🤔 Gonna do some sleuthing around the web

Do you happen to know anything about extensibility of Jekyll? Is there anything which would hinder the creation of a custom page that's based on React/similarly down the line, for when we might want to introduce more features to the website.

I'm considering simply creating a Jekyll Proof of Concept. Take some time out of my day tomorrow to see if I can somehow address the above two concerns in code. If both are non-issues, then I feel like Jekyll is a clear winner.

[karlbeecken]

The Markdown-learning and versioning problem can be shipped around using prose.io, just have a look, it will automtically commit changes.

[linahanner]

@karlbeecken I haven't had as much time as I would have liked today and I don't expect to have a lot of time until the weekend. If you'd like to attempt to make a proof of concept then go ahead, otherwise I'll do it this weekend.

[linahanner]

Am being told time and time again that the event map is the most important piece to the puzzle, if the map doesn't work then any technical solutions we suggest would be denied and rejected because it is integral to the international website.

From examining the current solution it appears the event map is built using leaftlet.js. From what I have been told by Jens, the data is contained in a .csv file which is loaded in using PHP when the page is retrieved. This data is then appended to the page in the form of a JavaScript variable, called eventmap_data. None of these things seem particularly technically difficult and could probably be achieved in multiple different ways, I cannot seem to detect a dependency on PHP specifically.

I want to include this to the Proof of Concept.