Inside ASI-AP

I was involved in a customer issue this last week at CSA that was about a new design for their existing iMIS Content Manager website. The ASI part of the project was to take the new design for home and inside pages and build new CM. Of course, one of the real advantages of using a template based content manager, like the iMIS Content Manager, is that you can get a whole new website for just the cost of a new design and updating the templates. A few years ago (or even now if you don't use a content management system) this exercise of redesigning a website would have been very expensive.

But all that advantage was lost in confusion around the design and how it would be implemented. Normally we work interactively with the design company (if they hadn't worked with iMIS before) so that they didn't design something that couldn't be coded into the templates. For some reason, we did not do this. So we got to the kick off meeting and there was confusion about whether we could or could not implement the design in CM. Added to the confusion, was that the design company was promoting XHTML standards, and when we said we couldn't support one of the design features in CM, they offered to build it in XHTML, which we couldn't really support anyway in these particular templates. So the project was put on hold and escalated to me.

As of today, everything has been resolved, we can actually implement the design in CM, and the project has come off hold.

But it is clear to me there is confusion in our team about XHTML and our support of that standard, so I wanted to provide more information to help you understand.

There is a very good outline of XHTML on Wikipedia at this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML

If you are involved in any part of the iMIS web functionality, you need to read that Wikipedia article.

The second resource is actually a posting from the NiUG list serve last year, from RACS, regarding our use of heavily tabled pages in CM, particularly for tagged pages. There is an internal discussion on iMISCommunity.com at this link here: http://www.imiscommunity.com/discussion_topic_in_niug

Note that this relates to iMIS 10 versions mainly (all the comments are dated 2006). Most of the useful information is in the comments.

Going forward with iMIS 15, we are taking the feedback seriously and we have already committed to CSS based standards. In fact our Dev team published to iMIS Community a document back in May on use of CSS in iMIS for comment: http://www.imiscommunity.com/css_conventions

The final version of this document was published to the iMIS Community Developers Guide here: http://www.imiscommunity.com/developers_guide

Note that although the CSS guide is complete, it is not yet fully implemented.

Finally, Beau published a blog entry last week on "evaluating your website in 30 seconds" which provides some practical examples (including screen shots) of all the theory in action.

So in summary - for e-Series and Content Manager in iMIS 10 - we don't use CSS/XHTML, and the main area of comment is in the use of tables for layout. For iMIS 15, we are doing all the right things moving to CSS based designs and the latest standards.