HEI - A HIGH EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS

ORIENTED CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Making Easy the Web Content Publishing for High Education Institutions

Roger Wagner and Francisco Assis Moreira do Nascimento

Faculdades de Taquara, FACCAT, Rua Oscar Martins Rangel, 4500, Taquara, Brasil

Keywords:

Content Management Systems (CMS), Web Applications, Information Systems, Institutional Portals.

Abstract:

This work presents a content management system (CMS) oriented to high education institutions, allowing

the optimization of the internal web publishing processes in a way that encourages the uniformity of the

information exhibition on the Web. Our CMS tool also enforces that the portal of the institution must be the

starting point for any resource offered by the many faculties of the Institution. We applied our CMS tool to

develop the portal of a high education institution and this case study has shown the efﬁciency and practicability

of our approach.

1 INTRODUCTION

Content Management Systems (CMS) are tools that

make the web publishing process more agile and re-

liable by providing a better support to the inclusion

and updating of content information. So using CMS

tools one can concentrate on the content itself and not

much on how to publish it (Boiko, 2001).

As it is described in (ContentManager, 2004), a

CMS tool allows to create, to edit, to manage and then

to publish many different kinds of content by people

from a technical staff (in a centralized way) as well

as by people from a non-technical staff (in a decen-

tralized way). In any case, the staff can make use of

a CMS application with its set of rules, processes and

workﬂows, which guarantees a valid and consistent

exhibition of the content on the Web.

The growing quantity of digital content produced

by the organizations and the necessity of document

sharing in a rapid and easy manner by using the Web

are the main driving factors to the emergence of the

CMS tools (Bax, 2005). Thus to cope with these fac-

tors the Content Management must allow to manage

all phases of the Web publishing process, since the

creation until the publication of the content.

A CMS tool can be divided in seven layers (Ti-

wana, 2000): interface, access and authentication,

collaborative intelligence and ﬁltering, application

layer, transport, integration, and data repository. The

objective of these set of layers is to deal with the main

problems of the content management (Bax, 2003):

• different kinds of difﬁculties that restrain the con-

tent production adequated to the Web;

• lack of compromising or involvement by the users

due to technical difﬁculties of publication and use

(excluding the motivational aspects, which the

content management system can give support with

some speciﬁc features;

• lack of more elaborated content organization of

the information items and their relationships in the

form of links;

• different kinds of errors and low quality informa-

tion;

• inﬂexible interfaces mixed with the content in a

not customizable or not conﬁgurable way

One of the current techniques adopted by CMS

tools is the decentralization, where the technical staff

is not responsible anymore to publish the content re-

lated to the business of the company and this activity

passed to the staff that directly produce the informa-

tion (Lapa, 2004).

The present work proposes a content management

system oriented to high education institutions. Its

463

Wagner R. and Assis Moreira do Nascimento F. (2007).

HEI - A HIGH EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS ORIENTED CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM - Making Easy the Web Content Publishing for High

Education Institutions.

In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Web Interfaces and Applications, pages 463-469

DOI: 10.5220/0001287804630469

 SciTePress

main objective is to optimize the web publishing pro-

cess in a way that makes easy the dissemination of

information directly to the speciﬁc kind of public that

is part of high education institutions. Most of the ex-

isting CMS tools oriented to this same kind of insti-

tution (for example, the Moodle tool (Moodle, 2006))

is focused on the learning activities and not in the at-

tractive and efﬁcient dissemination of institutional in-

formation.

The paper is organized as follows. The section 2

presents some CMS tools which are focused on high

education institutions. In the section 3, the deﬁnition

of our content management system is described in de-

tails. In the section 4 an overview on the development

process of our CMS tool is presented, showing the

features and use of each part of it. In the section 5,

a case study is reported to illustrate the applicability

of our approach. The section 6, we give some direc-

tions for future work and in the section 7 we present

the conclusions of our work.

2 RELATED WORKS

Currently one very popular CMS tool is the Moo-

dle tool (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learn-

ing Environment). Its ﬁrst version appeared in 1999

and since then its main focus is on features to sup-

port learning activities. Moodle is modular and open

source (Fernandes, 2005). In the Moodle tool the con-

tents are made available in the form of virtual class-

rooms, where the teacher publishes the content of a

course and can use some Moodle features to propose

learning tasks to the students. Our approach is com-

pletely different of the Moodle focus, since we intend

to facilitate the dissemination of information and not

to support the learning process.

Another popular CMS tool is TYPO3, which has

its development started in 1997 by Kasper Skrhj

(TYPO3, 2006). At that time, the CMS term had

not been yet created. TYPO3 is also open source and

offers ﬂexibility and extensibility for its tools, which

have ready-to-use interfaces, functions and modules.

But differently of our approach, TYPO3 is oriented

to the content of companies in general and not high

education institutions (Hinderink, 2005).

Mambo Server is also a very popular CMS tool

and has been used to implement many different kinds

of websites (Shreves, 2006). Mambo is open source

but recently some changes in the licensing terms

caused some developers to leave the Mambo team and

to start a new project called Joomla. Joomla (Graf,

2006) is a Mambo based content management tool

that uses PHP and MySQL as implementation tech-

nologies and has a growing community of develop-

ers. Joomla is mainly oriented to a non-technical au-

dience, so it is more focused on personal websites.

3 CONTENT MANAGEMENT

SYSTEM

Our content management system is modular, object

oriented and can be easily conﬁgurable. In the current

version, our CMS provides some very useful modules

to be used in the development of institutional por-

tals. These initial modules follow the object oriented

paradigm and are very well documented, so they may

also serve as starting point for the development of new

modules.

The ﬁgure 1 shows the current modules of our

CMS tool.

Figure 1: Flow diagram.

In the next sections, the modules presented in the

ﬁgure 1 are described in details. All the modules are

mainly oriented to the content visualization.

3.1 News

The news module is a powerful tool for the manage-

ment of the institutional news. This module allows

the listing of the latest news in the initial web page

with headlines and categories. The module provides a

rapid access to the news content in a completely struc-

tured way, making easy the visualization by the sys-

tem user. The module also offers a good pagination

WEBIST 2007 - International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies

464

mechanism with listings by month and year in order to

make easy the searching for a given news. The news

module allows to post news dynamically by means

of an administrator panel with many resources, where

one can delete, alter, and insert news. In order to cre-

ate and edit news, one has complete control on how to

present the edited text by means of all basic resources

found in a text editor.

3.2 Agenda

With the agenda module it is possible to publish on

the portal the information about all courses, confer-

ences, events, etc., which are available to students,

teachers and community in general. The module al-

lows the listing of the events by departments that are

offering the event, as well as by month. Thus, the

agenda module is useful as a way to disseminate all

information about the various activities that are oc-

curring in the institution. The items in the agenda can

be shown directly on the main page of the institution,

where to the next events to occurs will be given more

relevance.

3.3 Publications

The publications module allows to organize the con-

tents about materials published by the institution as,

for example, published books, scientiﬁc magazines,

scientiﬁc exhibitions, and proceedings of symposia

and conferences. Thus all kind of publications are

covered by this module in a way that facilitates the ac-

cess to all this kind of information. The module was

developed specially to deal with the visual publica-

tion of book covers and download of technical papers

and scientiﬁc magazines. Thus the module follows

all characteristic standards to provide an uniform or-

ganization for all this kind of content in a high edu-

cation institution. The module is entirely customiz-

able, adopting the use of logos to identify function-

alities, and presents the covers of the publications on

the administrative panel of the module. The module

has support to many different image formats, as for

example, jpg, gif, and png, which will be automati-

cally processed to a better visualization on the web

page. All the content adopts the pdf format as stan-

dard, which makes easy the access to the material by

the visitors of the portal. The editor user manages the

publishing process by means of the creation of edi-

tions and/or volumes for a speciﬁc magazine, and top-

ics for books that are classiﬁed according to the year

of publication. The editor user can also schedule the

submissions to the created editions, then organize its

summaries, and ﬁnally publish the edition. A mag-

azine can be published in the pdf format, one ﬁle for

each edition, monthly (or bi-monthly, or by semester).

3.4 Projects

The module for management of projects offers an in-

terface to create all the different projects associated to

the institution. The module allows to create user inter-

faces to courses, as well as academic guides, teacher

manuals, and all this kind of information with a struc-

ture focused on access areas.

3.5 External Links

The external links module provides two methods that

can be used to exhibit external web pages inside of

our CMS. In both methods it is maintained the unity

and focus on our CMS pages. Either the external web

page is incorporated inside a page at our CMS or the

external page is opened by using layers, which are

structured with XML-DOM features.

3.6 Downloads

In the downloads module it is possible to list all the

available content of a given portal area, including de-

tails as ﬁle size, number of access to the ﬁle, etc.

3.7 Gallery

The gallery module allows organizing listings of pho-

tos for portal areas that can use images as content

items. These listings include thumbnails in the ad-

ministrative panel for the available photos, which are

automatically generated by the server. The module

has support to all common image formats (as for ex-

ample, jpg, gif, and png) and converts each image for

the system standard format, which is the jpg and can

perform an analysis that can identify possible distor-

tions in the converted image.

3.8 Texts

The text module is very simple and allows just ex-

hibiting a text that was edited by the user, without any

further processing.

3.9 Banners

With the banners module it is possible to create ban-

ners and access buttons, which are linked to content

available on any of the previous mentioned modules.

The banners and access buttons can be placed on the

main page of the portal.

HEI - A HIGH EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS ORIENTED CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM - Making Easy the

Web Content Publishing for High Education Institutions

465

4 DEVELOPMENT PROCESS OF

THE CONTENT

MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

The development of the content management system

has followed a formal software engineering process,

using the UML notation. The development process

will be explained in the following sections.

4.1 Analysis

In the analysis phase it was used UML diagrams to

produce a standardized documentation. From the re-

quirements analysis it was identiﬁed some aspects as

essential: easy and ﬂexible features for content man-

agement; user authentication with customizable per-

missions access control for diffent kinds of users; ag-

ile and easily customizable layout.

The ﬁgure 2 shows the use case diagram that was

modelled from the requirements analysis.

Figure 2: Use case diagram.

Also based on the identiﬁed system requirements,

it was deﬁned some main concepts for the system, as

for example: All individuals that access the portal are

deﬁned as ”users”; A ”guest” is an user that has not

been authenticated and so has permissions just to view

the public content of the portal; A possible authenti-

cated user is the ”admin”, which can manage content

items of the portal; ”Manage content items” func-

tionality includes the ”insert”, ”edit”, ”delete”, and

”view” standard operations, which are also present

in the ”Manage news”, ”Manage agenda”, ”Man-

age publications”, ”Manage banners”, and ”Manage

projects” functionalities. Thus, the ”admin” user has

total control of the system, since the ”Manage content

items” functionality is the basis for all others func-

tionalities.

From theses concepts, class diagrams for users

and items were modelled. The ﬁgure 3 shows the

class diagram for ”user”.

Figure 3: Class diagram for users.

The class diagram for users shows the deﬁnition of

two kinds of users in the system: ”visitante” (guest)

and ”admin” (administrator). In ﬁgure 4 we have the

class diagram for items.

Figure 4: Class diagrams for items.

4.2 Design

Based on the information from the analysis phase,

it was decided to structure the system in blocks in

a manner that would make easier to integrate new

blocks. The main part of the system is shown in the

ﬁgure 5.

Figure 5: Basic structure of the system objects.

WEBIST 2007 - International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies

466

It was also decided to adopt the MVC

(Model/View/Controller) design pattern in the

design of the system. MVC enforces the separation

of the application logic (Model part) from the user

interface (View part) and from the application control

ﬂow (Controller part). Thus MVC allows that a same

business logic be accessed and viewed by means of

different kinds of user interfaces (Wikipedia, 2006).

In the ﬁgure 6, it is shown the different parts of our

tool.

Figure 6: MVC Standard.

For a correct implementation, the object struc-

ture listed above was adopted. The layers for Model,

View, Controller have been implemented in such a

manner that the inversion of the order is ot possible.

For instance, the interface layer (View) depends on

the control layer (Controller), which implements the

model layer (Model), but the inverse order can not

happen. The template design has followed the system

module structure. The ﬁgure 7 illustrates this tem-

plate organization.

Figure 7: Template design.

4.3 Implementation

Our CMS tool is based on the AJAX and XML-DOM

technologies, which can manipulate asynchronously

the web requisitions. These technologies contribute

to increase the portal performance by updating only

parts of the web page, which have changed and so

must be updated.

Moreover, it was adopted as programming lan-

guage, one that is already considered a standard to

the implementation of web applications, which is the

PHP scripting language web (Adonai, 2004). PHP is

open source and facilitates the data manipulation in

a ﬂexible and scalable way. In the current version of

our CMS tool, we use the PHP 5, which gives support

to all concepts of object oriented programming.

The database management system MySQL was

chosen to implement the database part of our CMS

tool. MySQL is also open source and priorizes three

important aspects: performance, reliability and us-

ability (AB, 2006).

5 CASE STUDY: FACCAT’S

PORTAL

The necessity of a better tool to manage the web con-

tent of the institutional portal of the Faculdades de

Taquara (FACCAT) (FACCAT, 2005), a small univer-

sity at the Rio Grande do Sul state in South of Brazil,

was the starting point to the development of our CMS

tool.

5.1 FACCAT’s Previous Portal

In the previous FACCAT’s institutional portal, the

content management was entirely manual, where each

updating would imply the manual edition of many

html pages. For example, to change the structure of a

menu at the main page of the portal, it was necessary

to edit all possible affected html pages. In the ﬁgure

8 is shown the main web page of the previous portal.

The portal shown in the above ﬁgure is imple-

mented by a huge html page, with no possibility of

content management and a very difﬁcult and manual

customization process.

Due to the great overhead in the maintenance of

the html pages, many internal web pages were kept

outdated. This situation produced much inconsistent

information across the portal, making it entirely un-

reliable. Since the content management was realized

in a per-page process, no standard could be enforced.

So it was very common to have many different pages

with very similar contents.

HEI - A HIGH EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS ORIENTED CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM - Making Easy the

Web Content Publishing for High Education Institutions

467

Figure 8: FACCAT’s previous portal.

5.2 FACCAT’s New Portal

The new FACCAT’s institutional portal, developed

using our CMS tool, has its content managed by the

basic modules of our tool, including the news, agenda,

and banners modules on its main web page, and using

the above mentioned modules in the internal structure

of the new portal. The ﬁgure 9 shows the main web

page of the new institutional portal.

Figure 9: FACCAT’s new portal.

As suggested by the above ﬁgure compared to the

ﬁgure 8, the improvements on the portal are related to

the increase in the access time and to the new features

for the content management.

With the new implementation, the management of

institutional publications ﬁnally was incorporated to

the portal. It was possible to publish all editions of

the scientiﬁc magazines, books, scientiﬁc exhibitions

and proceedings. The inclusion of external content in

the portal was also made possible. Thus, the visitors

can have access to external contents without losing

the focus on the portal. The new implementation of

the FACCAT’s portal allows the realization of admin-

istrative tasks via web by using the basic modules of

our CMS tool.

6 FUTURE WORK

The implementation of a webmail module for our

CMS tool is one of the planned future works. This

will integrate the institutional portal with the elec-

tronic mail system of the institution by means of the

imap protocol.

An aspect to be investigated is the use of access

levels to the administrative area of the CMS tool in

order to stablish a better distribution of the adminis-

trative tasks among the modules.

7 CONCLUSION

This paper presented a CMS tool oriented to high ed-

ucation institutions, which makes easy the web pub-

lishing process and facilitates the creation and updat-

ing of a communication channel between the institu-

tion and its internal (students, teachers and adminis-

trative staff) and external (visitors fo the portal) com-

munity.

Institutional portals developed by using our CMS

tool support huge quantity of diary accesses and the

provided communication channel provide informa-

tion on all services offered by the institution, includ-

ing events, news and notes, as well as academic infor-

mation for student for example, offered courses, cur-

rent schedules, etc.

The new institutional portal of the FACCAT, de-

veloped using our CMS tool, has improved the dis-

semination of the news and events related to the aca-

demic activities. The members of the staff, which are

responsible for the portal, emphasized how easy is to

maintain the content of the new portal, the visitors

have noted the constant updating of the content and

so they come back to the portal more frequently.

REFERENCES

AB, M. (2006). Mysql ab :: Why mysql? URL:

http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/.

Adonai, C. (2004). PHP & MySQL: Guia Avanado. Bras-

port.

WEBIST 2007 - International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies

468

Bax, F. S. P. M. P. (2003). GESTO DE CON-

TEDO COM SOFTWARES LIVRES. URL:

http://www.netic.com.br/docs/publicacoes/pub0004.pdf.

Bax, F. S. P. M. P. (2005). Gerao de sistemas de gesto de

contedo com softwares livres. CLEI’05 - Conferncia

Latino-Americana de Informtica.

Boiko, B. (2001). Content Management Bible. Wiley.

ContentManager (2004). What is a Con-

tent Management System. URL:

http://www.contentmanager.eu.com/history.htm.

FACCAT (2005). Faccat - faculdades de taquara. URL:

http://www.faccat.br/.

Fernandes, P. L. J. P. J. (2005). O moodle e as

comunidades virtuais de aprendizagem. URL:

http://www.dct.fct.unl.pt/PLegoinha/CNGMood.pdf.

Graf, H. (2006). Building Websites with Joomla! Packt.

Hinderink, W. A. R. F. D. (2005). TYPO3 Enterprise Con-

tent Management. packt.

Lapa, E. (2004). Gesto de contedo. Brasport.

Moodle (2006). O moodle e as comunidades virtuais de

aprendizagem. URL: http://moodle.org/.

Shreves, R. (2006). Mambo: Your visual blueprint for build-

ing and maintaining Web sites with the Mambo Open

Source CMS. Visual.

Tiwana, A. (2000). The knowledge management toolkit:

Pratical techniques for buildings a knowledge man-

agement system. Prentice Hall.

TYPO3 (2006). The history of typo3. URL:

http://typo3.com/History.1268.0.html.

Wikipedia (2006). Mvc. URL:

http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/MVC.

HEI - A HIGH EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS ORIENTED CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM - Making Easy the

Web Content Publishing for High Education Institutions

469