CMS for university to hold Master's theses and science articles
need CMS to post Professor articles, graduate students' Master's theses, and software
Hello everyone.
I have no experience with content management systems, so I would be eternally grateful if someone could provide me with some insight if Yet Another Community System will meet my needs.
I'm working on developing a web-based CMS for a science-related department at my university. The idea is that professors would be able to submit all types of data on there, such as master's theses, science articles, and software.
Here's a few use cases:
1. Professor submits a link to a great Science Magazine they read over the weekend about gene splicing.
2. Graduate student submits their Master's thesis on gene splicing.
3. Another Professor finds a great piece of software that helps with modeling gene splicing.
4. A random student comes in, searches for "gene splicing" in the CMS, and the CMS comes back with the link to the Science Magazine article, the grad student's Master's thesis, and that gene splicing piece of software.
The system would also catch duplicates, so that all five Professor's wouldn't be able to post the same Science article.
Is this possible? Would Yet Another Community System be good for this?
Like I said, any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thanks ahead of time! 
| GnapZ from Caribbean 2970 posts |
Hello and welcome, I'm french and not very good in english. So your needs could be managed by Yacs but this CMS has its logic and you have to learn a little. After it everything is easy. Please look at the documentation for features beacuase you can post links and files as you want, control and publish the only ones you want, make a forum to talk with groups and so on. For duplicates, you cannot know if people will post twice a time the same article so an associate (like an Administrator) has to look for this. The search module is powerfull and can display every request inside articles, comments, links and every think where the text match. Bernard and Fernand, the master associates are not here but Bernard will be back next week so il you can wait a little, he will explain this better than me. Take a look at the documentation and the forums and try the search module. Regards. |
Bernard from nearby-an-airport Associate, 6696 posts |
Yes Sir! Actually YACS has been designed initially exactly for the purpose you describe, and one of the largest YACS existing today is used as an open knowledge base with hundred of volunteers to contribute. Any YACS server can be considered as a "heap of things", with most recent items appearing first, and easy means to add new items (= heritage from the blog approach). One article can support attached images, files, or links, or even comments, from the initial author or from other contributors (= heritage from groupware approach). The search engine, which is a bare one, still allows for full-text search among articles, files, and links (= the Google attitude). You have several RSS feeds to track new articles, new files, etc (= everything is in syndication). Create a hierarchical set of sections to place articles, and move pages around when necessary (= same concept than files in directories). Assign categories to articles to develop taxonomies (= the easy way to handle meta-information). To foster server usage, add forums and send newsletters (= augment presence to your site). Do you want more? |
| TheAlchemist 19 posts |
Thank you GnapZ and Bernard for your quick responses. It really does look like YACS may do what I need it to do. The features you describe, Bernard, are perfect! You describe the search engine as "bare," but it does everything I can imagine the CMS for my college's department wanting! The ability to "assign categories to articles" is just icing on the cake. The one thing that I still need for CMS is the ability to prevent different professor's from submitting the same paper, article, file, etc. From the Features page, I see that YACS supports Modules as a means to extend YACS. Would I be able to write a module to see whether any exist like it? I understand I may have to write some code to do this, and I'll be glad to write it and probably open source it. But is it possible? Once again, thanks GnapZ and Bernard! |
| Bernard from nearby-an-airport Associate, 6696 posts |
TheAlchemist: detecting duplicates would definitely be an interesting function. How will you manage to do that? |
| TheAlchemist 19 posts |
Bernard: Well, I'd need some kind of duplicate-detection engine. At the very least, I could compare the text and title of the two submissions. This is with precedent: many Bugzilla setups will show you similar bugs to the one you wanna submit and ask you to verify that it's not a duplicate. I might even be able to steal some code from Bugzilla.  If not, I'll write something basic on my own.The only question is whether I can hook into YACS and do this. Bernard?
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| Bernard from nearby-an-airport Associate, 6696 posts |
TheAlchemist: You are right, we should add some hook to do that. Maybe a validation step at post time? |
| TheAlchemist 19 posts |
" TheAlchemist: You are right, we should add some hook to do that. Maybe a validation step at post time? " You know way better than I do what it will take, but a "validation step at post time" sounds great! Should I file a ticket somewhere? |
| Bernard from nearby-an-airport Associate, 6696 posts |
TheAlchemist: Nope, this has been added to the to-do list, which is actually spread in code. You now just have to wait for something to get out of that... |
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Posted by TheAlchemist on June 10 2006, commented by Bernard on June 10 2006, (popular)
