But I’m keen to explore CMS more widely. Setting up something on Joomla might be a next step. Your posts on comparing different versions of CMS are very interesting – worth clicking through to for anyone reading who’d like to explore this further. I’m especially interested in how you got Branford Magazine to handle images – I find Der Prinz themes a nightmare…

In the units I run at Solent, we have 60 students contributing a load of content to a site each week and Joomla! has taken everything (so far) we have thrown at it.

Mac User has done a great comparison this month of the various CMS – Joomla! wins.

There are always improvements to be made and I would like to see much better handling of audio/video content.

Drupal is appealing though, I know Kent Uni use it a lot.

http://www.plenty2say.com

Also, this is by no means an issue solely for this university. I have encountered this elsewhere, and it’s due to the factors related by Steve in his comment. There’s an in-built tendency to use the tools that are easily available on the university’s systems – and for various reasons (some good, some not so) it is not easy to change these significantly.

It’s also worth remembering that, as Martin Cloake has pointed out in a recent article, education is not training. We certainly shouldn’t get obsessed with following the latest industry software fads (Second Life, anyone?).

Still – this move should be rewarding and interesting. I look forward to seeing how the students develop…

At UCA’s journalism department in Farnham, Simon and myself as course leader have debated this issue over the past several months.

I have had my own doubts about Dreamweaver for some time. But, as in many universities, the media production software installed across the UCA network is Adobe Creative Suite and so Dreamweaver is readily to hand when one is looking for a web development platform. There are also all the usual corporate IT difficulties in setting up shared network disk space for student collaborative working or, even more difficult, trying to set up a CMS for classroom use.

My own view is that there is a set of transferable skills for online journalists which are now emerging, and which we should be teaching, irrespective of the specifics of the classroom production environment. These include writing and organizing material with search engines firmly in mind; familiarity with the principles of content management environments, such as working with and writing to page templates, and using subject tagging intelligently; and an understanding of some of the ‘under the bonnet’ HTML and coding stuff that makes the web tick – not so as to turn out code monkeys – but so that the constraints of the web are appreciated.

It will be very interesting to see how the experiment with WordPress as a classroom group production environment develops.