Content management systems rarely live up to their promises. They’re hard to use, limit creativity and stifle innovation. Decentralised editing leads to poor quality copy, duplication of content and pages which haven’t been looked at since HTML 3.2 was new. At the other end of the scale you face problems of overloaded web developers who don’t understand what they’re publishing to the web, constantly fire-fighting with no time for new developments.At Edge Hill University, we’ve tried to navigate the middle ground by deploying or developing tools appropriate for the sites we want to create. Using structured content management we can keep our sites fresh, pushing information out to places where it’s relevant.The foundation of all our sites is the Symfony web framework. This session will look at how our development team has made the change from working with static pages, Dreamweaver templates and classic ASP to a modern PHP framework encouraging more agile development practices and focusing on delivering usable systems.As a web applications developer turned “management”, I’ll try to give both sides of the story.
For the coder!sell the benefits to the business to help persuade your bossdevelop yourself by learning from other people’s best practicescreate cool stuff quickly and easilyFor the manager!get more out of your developers for the same level of resource make marketing central to your website develop your staff without the need for costly certificationI don’t have all the answers, but I’ve got opinions about almost everything!