We've seen ongoing discussions about the virtues and hassles of courseware such as WebCT on this list, and in general I am in favor of teaching people to use html and write their own pages.



I am also a paid staff member in charge of the department website, and in response to the new chair's desire that our office staff begin adding more "content" to our site (which is a good thing) I have been toying with the idea of installing some sort of content management system, or CMS.



Content management systems can be something as simple as blogger, which let an individual write journal entries in a form and click "submit" to upload the files, or something more complex like http://www.slashdot.org , "news for nerds" which allows multiple users to submit stories which are approved by an editorial staff. Each story can be responded to by users, and readers can filter the discussion topics so that they only see the comments that receive high ratings by peer evaluators.



Recently a new hire from UT Austin showed me a cool setup made with ColdFusion (yet another server program, but an expeeeeensive one) that allows users to create and link to pages, upload word documents, etc. all within the browser. The software automatically creates a site map of all of the content.



With that in mind, I'm trying to decide whether the office staff should learn html or an authoring package, or whether to install some sort of content management system that will allow website updates via the browser. The situation is slightly different than the classroom, simply because the staff don't have the time (or often the inclination) to spend a semester learning the web tools. There is also the problem of turnover, and reteaching new people. Finally, I have a lot of oter responsibilities in addition to maintaining the website, so I can't devote unlimited time to teaching html to the staff, and in the Fall we will all simply be too busy.



On the other hand, it only takes about an hour to learn the basics of dreamweaver, and much of their work would consist of updating existing pages.



So has anyone encountered this situation before or are you using a content management system to keep your pages updated?



Thanks in advance for any helpful suggestions,



MC





disclaimer: the words "content," "user," and "management" are all symbolically enclosed in invisible, postmodern quotes indicating that I know they are problematic :)