Texas State University implemented a campus-wide content management system to standardize and simplify website creation and maintenance across the university's ~350 websites. The CMS, Magnolia, has been well-received by users, with 97% recommending it. It provides easy-to-use and centralized website creation and management, addressing prior issues of disparate and poorly designed sites requiring extensive maintenance. The CMS implementation was informed by user needs like ease of use, common look and feel, and centralized management.

1. Texas State & Magnolia

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

3. 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

4. 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

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

6. 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

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

8. 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

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

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

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

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

13. 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

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

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

16. 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

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

18. Live sites

19. Questions?