We’ve recently been considering the need to provide a distinct name for the CMS we’re developing to bring clarity to what we are providing, and future project communication.

We’ve talked about the need for a name for this new product in the UWP for a while, and certainly before our communications to site publishers accelerate in the period of transition to the new system. After considering a few options, we collectively agreed that “EdWeb” suits our purpose, as it can be used both for the ‘central‘ “EdWeb“, and “EdWeb Distributions” around the University, and separates it from other tools currently in use. We put this name to the University Website Publishers Community session on September 25, and ran a short survey afterwards to ensure that we could rely on your support for this name, and we were encouraged by the positive response.

Considerations

The new centrally-managed University CMS (hereafter, EdWeb), will be a separate product both from Polopoly (our current CMS) and from ‘off the shelf’ Drupal. It’s important to us that users are clear that EdWeb will work differently and has distinct functions from other sites using Drupal code, and therefore training and support is required to use our product.

Additionally, our EdWeb code will also be used in ‘distributions’ across the University, and we want to be clear about what is being provided. These ‘distributions’ will allow technical staff across the University to take our code, develop it for their own needs and purposes, and run separate (but closely related) sites. However, our training and much of our support material will still be relevant to these sites basic function.

The framework we’ll work under is represented below, showing the relation of the centrally managed site to distributed sites, and the prospects for future additions to our framework.

New University CMS Framework Plan