Texas State & Magnolia

About Texas State University
30,000 Students
3,500 Faculty and Staff
5th largest university in the state
~350 distinct websites

Life on campus before CMSes
Every site looked different
Most were poorly designed and constructed
Sites hosted on whatever equipment the department had, usually under a desk
Lack of people to maintain them

Our users
Majority of university staff are not comfortable with computers
They want a site that makes them look great but actually only took five minutes

Early CMSes
WebGUI - Our standard for user friendliness
Vignette - Our standard for user hostility
Blackboard - Introduced a lot of content management concepts

The Big Project
In 2004 we realized our campus needed an easy and readily available way to build and maintain web sites
Our focus shifted from creating single web sites to building a system the entire campus could use

What our users needed
Easy to use - very important
Common look and feel
Central management

Information Architecture
Created standard navigation for four types of university web site
Two major benefits:
Sped adoption of the CMS
Discouraged users from trying to come up with their own navigation styles

Selecting Magnolia
Very informal process
Hybrid Open source / Commercial
Availability of support
We saw that Magnolia shared our priorities

Technical Implementation
Set up multiple sites in one installation
Integrated with other systems
Reused our existing caching system

User Implementation
Introduced it to users early for feedback
We were adamant that we were not forcing anyone
Added features for the power users

Info Sessions
A session for new users
Tell them what it is, and what is isn’t
Demo
Site best practices

Training & Documentation
Single two hour session to teach the basics, then another two hour session for advanced topics
We wrote our own documentation for end users

The Good
Easy to use
Efficient - Few servers required, easy to develop
Plugin architecture
Upgrades, after the version management was introduced

The Bad
Synchronization between author and public instances
Backups and recovery of data
Accessibility, particularly for blind users
End user documentation

User Response
97% of our users said they would recommend the CMS to others
User survey results gave us a lot of useful data
Word of mouth helped adoption rate

Growth
Now hosting 240 sites
On the first day of classes this Fall, we served 327,332 pages

Live sites

Questions?

http://www.magnolia-cms.com	130
http://test-author.magnolia-cms.com	13
http://localhost	7
http://author.magnolia-cms.com	5
http://magnolia-cms.com	3

Texas State & Magnolia - Case Study

by SeanMcTex

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