Ingeniux Content Management System

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Comment by Ben on October 21, 2009 at 9:45am

There are a handful of data visualizations that you can use to address many to one relationships in navigation. The concept of primary (categorical) vs secondary (page siblings) navigation is one. The breadcrumb trail is another. I have seen other CMS' do this. Wordpress comes to mind. There is also a low end PHP CMS (subdreamer) that also does navigation exclusively. Many-to-one navigation really is at its best in a full on ecommerce site, where you want and need products to exist in as many relevant places on your site in order to increase the conversion rate of your traffic.

Comment by Colin Turnbull on July 2, 2009 at 4:21pm

Wow, this is exactly what I wanted out of this discussion...thanks, Susan and Jim for your comments. Jim, I'm sorry I missed you last time you were on campus.

I want to give a full description of our environment (for a redesign) and why taxonomy navigation is so appealing to me but I need leave the office for the day. You both gave me a lot to think about. Thanks again!

Comment by Jim Edmunds on July 2, 2009 at 1:30pm

Colin’s question is an interesting one. The notion that organizations may want to use a taxonomy to not only categorize content but to organize it for presentation is something that we’ve run across in the past.

One of our early customers, the United States Navy, organized and published an entire website – the Navy Lifelines site – just using taxonomy. This was before the taxonomy feature even existed in the CMS. They used a custom workflow action to pop-up a dialog for categorizing content as one of the workflow steps. The custom workflow action actually called an ASP page that presented a taxonomy listing stored in an Oracle database. Any given page may have hundreds of taxonomy references, and based on those references could show up in hundreds of places in the site. The site was published out of the CMS as just XML, and then rendered through Oracle. The site navigation was completely based on the taxonomy.

Susan raises an excellent point about the potential usability challenges with this kind of approach. I always thought the Navy Lifelines site was confusing to navigate. As Susan notes, people like context with their information and are accustomed to information living in hierarchies that are defined and persistent. I’m not sure if this preference is innate or socialized. It will be interesting to see if non-linear methods for accessing information like search, which by some estimates accounts for 70% of actual site navigation, change this behavioral preference in humans.

We are currently working with a customer, a large association, that is using taxonomy in site navigations in a more limited case. The site is divided into geographic regions. Each of the region editors want to prioritize different pages in the navigation structure based on their relevance to the region. We added a taxonomy category that would bump a page up to the top of its siblings in the left navigation, so that, for instance, the Asia Board of Directors page could show up at the top of the section while in the Asia regional site. We also have a whole section of the navigation that mirrors the taxonomy. This is a series of index pages that preserve the taxonomy structure. Each page is an index of items categorized with that term. The pages are created by a syncing custom tab.

We get requests all the time for allowing a page to show up in multiple places in the site, so it can be managed in one place but appear in multiple places. We use taxonomy, as well as the new References Element, to provide referential links to content, but this doesn’t really address the issue for our customers. They want the content to appear CONTEXTUALLY in a different section and different navigation. Interesting that those customers are asking for a system that removes the physical context from the content but maintains the virtual context.

And this gets to another core challenge with this approach. Where does the content editor access the content, if it is suddenly bereft of physical context? For some content items, like news and events, a task based approach could be a perfectly acceptable substitute for a physical location in the site tree. Gallaudet University has implemented a Xite client that allows the entire (authenticated) campus community to submit news and events from the live web page into the CMS. (Interestingly enough, those items are “categorized” with business rules that govern how and when they are displayed, another twist on the issue of different ways that content wants to be organized and presented. ) For task based content creation, like News and Events, maybe a site tree hierarchy is not needed. But for more narrative content – e.g., pages in the Admission Section – those content editors want to view and work on the content in the context of where it lives in an information hierarchy.

In reality, the site tree is just a virtual organizational scheme for site content. We use the site tree to define relationships between pages; parent-child and sibling are the most common. Using a taxonomy as the organization scheme is the same approach, conceptually, but once you go beyond having a one-to-one relationship between a page and a taxonomy category, there are all sorts of challenges. Each category has both a set of child pages and a set of child categories. Which of these sets display below it as children? If pages, how do you get to child categories? If categories, how do you ever reach a page? If both, isn’t that confusing? Also, when using a taxonomy one needs to craft business rules for defining content relationships that are naturally addressed by a physical hierarchy – for instance, what if there is no content for a specified category? What happens to content that has no category? In what order should content appear?

The bottom line for me is that taxonomy is a tantalizing but elusive approach to displaying content. It’s something we continue to experiment with, typically in more of a hybrid fashion where is it used in combination with navigations that are based on the “physical” site tree. For the more specific (and frequently requested) challenge of having content show up in more than one place, but managed just in one place, I think there are better solutions and we are working to provide those as part of the core application feature set.

Comment by Richard on July 2, 2009 at 11:22am

@Colin - I'd like to get a bit more on your issue too. Actually. Perhaps we should move these types of comments from the Wall and actually start forum discussions to preserve topics and for better reference.

Comment by Susan on July 2, 2009 at 10:05am

Colin,
I'm not sure if I am misunderstanding your question, but when thinking about usability, the majority of users expect that the hierarchy, which usually drives the breadcrumb navigation, IS how they "get" to pages. If site visitors cannot predict how/where to find things after visiting your site, they may become frustrated. Research shows that we have about a 10-25 second window for users to "hunt" for a link or keyword on a page before they get frustrated and move on. Information architecture is a key component of site usability.

Comment by Susan on July 2, 2009 at 10:02am

Why am I just now realizing I'm a member of this group? ROFL. Nathan, good thing I just realized, huh? haha.

Comment by Colin Turnbull on July 1, 2009 at 6:13pm

On the topic of taxonomy, it seems that most of the examples I have seen all deal with tagged or classified pages on a somewhat limited scale (ie, tag clouds, page index, categorized news, etc). It works great for these applications but when I think about taxonomy, I think about object relationships and hierarchies. So, what about using taxonomy in a broader sense to define more of a site-wide navigation? I'm sure somebody just cringed but I'd really like to hear the "why" or "why not". Along the lines of "separation of presentation and content", the back-end node relationships could be laid out in a way that best suits structured URLs (or maybe even ease-of-use for editors) and the navigation can be presented independent from that back-end hierarchy. I realize there would be some technical issues working within the constraints of the current taxonomy manager but am I just thinking about this wrong?

Comment by Nathan Eggen on June 18, 2009 at 11:08am

There are some sites with great uses of taxonomy out there. Champlain Colleg, in VT, features a site wide tag index that also features "spotlight tags" that are promoted by the institution. MICA uses taxonomy all over their site - but one example would be the MICA news home page. A non-higher education example with a slightly different flavor would be the Ingeniux Corporate blog which features a tag cloud that is based off of taxonomy applied to each blog post. Our site also features taxonomy for filtering lists of partners, locations, etc on other pages. These are just a few examples that come to mind.

If you've got a specific scenario that you want to discuss shoot me a PM with details.

Comment by Richard on June 15, 2009 at 4:02pm

Has anyone made use of the Taxonomy Navigation elements?

Comment by Nathan Eggen on June 12, 2009 at 2:03am

Hi Richard,

Nope, not at all - that is what the wall is for. Yep, an updated SchemaDesigner was released late last year. It now supports much easier definition of list elements and their contents. It also makes it easy to add CompTypes - something I didn't clearly explain in my earlier post. With the newest version, if you right-click in the CompTypes field of a component element definition, SchemaDesinger will display a list of all component schemas for the current site. You can download the newest version of SchemaDesigner from the Ingeniux 360 section of http://support.ingeniux.com.

Your RSS feed suggestion is a great idea for getting the KB info down to every end user. You could get part way there by leveraging the Custom CMS help in Version 6 and filling it in with your best end user focused content.

We're definitely looking for ways to make information more self-service. Keep the good ideas coming :)

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