Site Sports New Look and Feel

If you've visited www.informs.org in the last few weeks, perhaps you've noticed something new. It's been a long time in coming (I proposed this project as a goal in my first column as editor of IOL in February 2001). The new graphic design is the product of a long series of prototypes. We began the search for the design in 2001 with a student project conducted through the Maryland Institute College of Art. Design efforts moved in-house after that.

The look evolved through several reviews involving IOL associate editors and INFORMS staff until we settled on the version you see here. The artistic credit belongs primarily to INFORMS staffers Shirley Mohr and Kevin Addison. The top-level organization and the navigation system evolved over the same period, with the same review process. The most recent change addresses a pet peeve of mine: the term "subdivisions" to describe groups of members with professional or geographic affinity has always seemed awkward. The term has been dropped in favor of "communities."

Aside from the clean, exciting new layout, there are many changes that have been made or are in progress under the hood. Where the old site was a hodgepodge of HTML pages edited by hand or generated by Perl scripts, the new site is driven by a content management system (CMS). CMS provides two important functions: (1) it separates the look and feel of the site from the contents, and (2) it manages the workflow involved in publishing content. We selected a CMS product called WisePublisher (WP) from Wise Online Systems. WP is not open source, but it is a LAMP application, that is, it is built on the open-source platform of Linux, the Apache Web server, the MySQL database and the PHP Web scripting language.

We chose this direction rather than end-to-end open source because INFORMS does not have the staff to provide support for the CMS software itself, and it is difficult (in the United States in particular) to find companies that provide support for the open-source CMS systems. INFORMS has a partnership arrangement that gives us access to a broad range of support services directly from Wise.

Look and Feel

The public view of the IOL pages does not allow visitors to edit the content. If a user could log in, he or she would see that each page contains an Edit/Delete button. Clicking that button takes the user to a control panel containing the graphical view of the page in a sub-window. The panel contains a form and several tabs allowing logged-in editors to edit the page, review its history, carry out a discussion, publish it, etc.

If one chooses to edit the home page, the editor view covers from below the search bar to above the copyright notice. The header (down to the search bar) and the footer (the copyright notice) is set for every page. On the Membership page, the only editable area is the center part. The header, footer, fonts, colors and other aspects of the page's appearance are specified in a separate CMS page.

Because the content editor is separate from the page design, editors can create, add and modify content without having to worry about breaking other aspects of the page layout. WP has a built-in WYSIWYG editor that enables non-technical users to post articles. Meanwhile, designers can change the page layout in one place and have the changes carry through the entire site. The fact that most features of a page's appearance are controlled by the designer means that content contributors don't need to be experts in HTML. WP's built-in WYSIWYG editor makes the creation of pages by non-technical contributors easy.

Workflow

In order to manage the timely publication of information, pages can be drafted, reviewed, and set to appear and disappear automatically on particular dates. In addition, logged-in users can be assigned roles with collections of permissions. For example, "authors" can create articles but can't publish them without the approval of an "editor." An automatically generated site map keeps track of all active pages on the site. Images, PDF documents, and other special files are kept in a managed inventory.

More Changes to Come

Many of the key pages from the old site have been moved to the new site, but a number of the old site's dynamic pages are still served from there. (You can still visit and search the old site at www2.informs.org/oldindex.html.) Among those pages are the job placement and summer intern services, the continuing education listings, the various searchable databases, the online resources pages, the Miser-Harris Presidents' Gallery, the conference calendar and the archived online conference bulletins. These services will be moved or rebuilt over the next few months.

The migration of some pages is still in process. Some services have been retired (members' Web page search), and some inactive services are slated to be redone (the bookstore, discussion groups) as the technology is identified to implement them.

Let us know what you think of the new look, and please let us know if you find broken links or any other problems. Follow the Webmaster link from the footer of any page on the site, or write to [email protected].