About the Carleton Content Management System
What began as a project to renew the departmental websites at Carleton has grown into a robust and centralized Content Management System that powers more than 600 websites on carleton.ca. By separating content from presentation, Carleton CMS offers visitors consistent navigation while providing website maintainers with an easy to use web-interface.
If you require a public website, we can provide a domain (carleton.ca/sitename), a Carleton branded website, and training to manage the content on the site. Please note, that we cannot provide custom development at this time.
Eligible Clients
The CMS is available free of charge to Carleton University:
- Administrative departments
- Faculty departments
- Researchers (Over 100 of our current sites are research labs, projects, profiles, and departments)
This service is not available to faculty for personal web pages (sites that are not focused on research), nor to students (e.g., for clubs and associations).
See what our clients have to say about Carleton CMS on our testimonial page!
Training and Support
Web Services offers training and support to all new and existing CMS clients. This includes extensive online training and documentation, one-on-one sessions, and access to our newsletter with updates and tips.
Carleton CMS Features
- Accessible
All CMS sites meet Level AA compliance, outlined in Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) requires all sites to meet this level by 2021. - Mobile Ready and Responsive
CMS sites will adapt to fit any screen size. - Anti-Spam
Our anti-spam feature automatically encodes email addresses. No need to worry about publishing email addresses online. - Infinite Scroll
News, event and video listing pages will automatically scroll to reveal more posts. This gives content more exposure. - Shortcode Icons
Shortcode icons in the toolbar allow users to easily add functionality to your site without any coding and at the click of a button. - Social Networking
Visitors are able to easily share posts on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Add a Twitter feed to your footer.
Services Not Provided by Carleton CMS
- Post-migration content editing or updating.
We do not edit your content, pre or post-migration. We will advise regarding the navigation or overall organization of your content, but we do not edit or update your content. - Custom development and design.
The templates developed by Web Services ensure a consistent look and feel throughout University websites. We continually add new features to the templates, but we do not offer custom development at this time. - Custom database solutions.
When migrating your site we can link to any databases you may have, but we will not create a custom database or make any alterations to your current database.
Powered By WordPress
The Carleton CMS service itself integrates various software solutions. However, the bulk of our clients’ time, will be spent working within WordPress.
WordPress is an easy-to-use, open-source publishing platform that has grown to be one of the largest self-hosted publishing tools in the world. The WordPress platform benefits immensely from its open-source community’s development and support.
There are numerous advantages to using an open-source product like WordPress for both Carleton CMS clients and the broader web at Carleton.
Advantages
- Ease of use. Editing and publishing web pages using WordPress is simple and straightforward. These days there are a lot of great open-source content management systems available. The main reason for going with WordPress was its ease of use and focus on usability. WordPress started as a blogging platform, and as part of that, over time has kept publishing simple.
- Publishing speed. Editing and publishing content in WordPress is fast. Web content managers at Carleton will save a huge amount of time as compared to other methods of online publishing.
- Accessibility. WordPress is an online tool that complies with the standards of the W3C. A modern web browser is all that is required to work with the tool. No additional browser plugins, such as Java or Flash, are required.
- Features. Despite its ease of use, WordPress is on the cutting edge of web development and offers a wide array of key features and modern solutions to web publishing needs.
- Extensible. WordPress was designed so that users and developers can easily expand or add to its capabilities. This allows Carleton to tailor the platform to meet the needs of the University and at the same time leverage the vast open-source community constantly adding functionality to the platform.
- Cost. Open-source software, such as WordPress, is sometimes referred to as free software. The reference to free actually refers to freedom and not price. However, using WordPress means no licensing costs and does save money when compared to software with paid licensing