ALA on CMS
A List Apart is a site and mailing list primarily for website designers and of moderate value to people like me, who just roll content and fiddle with coding. The latest issue has a about content management sytems, like the CMS application I use, built on Conversant. For perusal at your convenience, it discusses some basic concepts.
The piece talks some about how a CMS imposes an approval process. Around these parts, "approval" consists of me or Matthew Patterson clicking a "publish" button. And even at that, all the content here is available immediately in the Discussion Group. Hardly an approval process if a member can post anything for immediate comment. I can see how an approval process would be handy--for example, to let an author post a piece for copyediting before publication and feedback. (Hints of Future Things in that statement.)
When Matt Mecham built the graphic design of Unreason, the approval process was a pretty standard one. He made several Photoshop mockups, then an HTML mockup. (Imagine Unreason in orange and blue. And, it had tabs for navigation. Matt was very nice when I asked him to never do tabs in a design for me ever again.) Then we broke it all down into pieces to spin into the cms. The day it went live, I tried an experiment I called a Virtual Barn Raising. It seemed a great idea at the time--get the site live, and have a bunch of people try it and tell me immediately things like "Hey, it crashed on Netscape!" That didn't work nearly as well as I hoped. We got hung up, believe it or not, on the rolllovers for the menu items at the top of every page! It turned out a key field in a posting form in the admin system wasn't filled out. Combine that with my life situation at the time--I was romantically involved with someone in a fashion that might be best described as "watching the tornado rip through your trailer park"--and the redesign in public idea basically fell apart.
It was still a neat idea, and I might consider doing it again if I ever do a major redesign of Unreason.
