Dawn of the Content Management module

By Nicole on 22. January 2009 in features, update | Comments(2)

Very early this morning we have updated our system to a new version (0.17.0). It is called “dawn” and comes up with a Content Management module, collaborative photo albums and a 1-minute network creation process (which is described in an extra blog post).

Photo albums
The news about the photos can be described briefly: Users now have the option to open their own albums to other members and allow them to add photos as well. This is highly suitable for images which are taken from different users but represent the same topic. Imagine for example photos of an event like a concert or a conference that can now be stored and shared in a common place. You find these settings in the “edit mode” of each album.

Content Management
By introducing the Content Management, we have created another module besides blog and wiki for writing and managing texts and other content. In the past, we often realised that both blog and wiki have been “missused” for other uses than they were actually invented for. Several networks use the wiki for static pages which can only be edited by the admin (or a few moderators) and include a certain amount of multi-media content. Blogs were also missused for this, e.g. by configuring them as an “admin-only” blog named “news”. In our point of view, blog and wiki can be used much more collaboratively and dynamic as they are now in some communities and should be open for a greater group of writers and editors.

Of course, our users are totally free in their way of using our modules, but we would like to offer them the best tools to optimise and maintain their networks! To accurately separate the modules we have created the new Content Management. It is more about having hierarchical content, sorted and linked via menu. The “newest at the top” aspect is mostly unimportant in this system.

Our mini CMS
Most of our networks involve static content like information about a company or organisation, FAQs, rules, manifestos, event schedules or other service offers etc. These pages all have in common, that they are created and/or used by just a few members. The Content System should solve many of these issues and we see it as a low-powered, simple CMS with even a simple way of users’ rights management.

Here are a few impressions:

By the way: You can easily change the title “Content Management” to a name that fits better to your kind of content in the feature admin and menu builder.

Navigation items
Navigation items serve to structure the content. The “edit mode” lets you add hierarchical levels and sorting orders as well as add new items.

You may not only define the hierarchy of each navigation item but also assign them to a content page.

Content pages
And that’s what the editor of a single content page looks like:

Please note: The content pages do not automatically appear in the sidebar but have to be connected to a navigation item first.

We are really curious about how you like this new module. Have fun creating your first pages and send feedback & questions!

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Tags: Album, CMS, collaboration, community, content management, dawn, photos, social network