Hi all,
We're finally getting around to do a website revamp and I wanted to ask the great invisible masses if anyone out there has had any experience doing a website overhaul that included connecting a CMS (most likely Wordpress) and TNEW.
We're really in the beginning stages of this, so any advice is helpful, specifically if you have heard of/know of any practitioners who are skilled in artful merging of the two.
We're also looking for potential vendors, pitfalls to be aware of, the best way to structure the design and build process, cool things others have done; really any you-think-is-useful information out there so we're better equipped to approach this. We're located in Santa Barbara on the West Coast, so local area recommendations are doubly useful, though I realize that's a long-shot.
Thanks in advance for taking the time!
-H
Hello Hudson,
I have a few thoughts, some of which may run contrary to the common practices of the Tessitura community, but hopefully it steers you to some helpful considerations.
First of all, using Wordpress as a CMS would require communicating with the SOAP API via PHP. Although it's possible to do so, the standard PHP SOAP libraries aren't fully compatible with the Microsoft-proprietarily formatted data returned by the SOAP API. This will increase complexity and required coding time. Perhaps someone has accounted for this incompatibility over the past few years, but it's something to inquire about. I recommend considering the .NET platform as an alternative to PHP. For better or for worse, the Tessitura community favors .NET, and Tessitura's documentation targets .NET almost exclusively.
On .NET as on any platform, beware of "big enterprise" CMSes. These corporate-focused products want to do a lot more than manage content, and this results in heavy-handed control over the implementation of your website. They're expensive, they have limited community support, and they get in the way at every turn. We're stuck with one such CMS (Kentico), and it's a total nightmare. As an alternative, I recommend a lightweight CMS such as Umbraco or Orchard.
A word on vendors: Be vigilant about code quality! I've seen at least four examples of website code delivered by a couple of Tessitura's most prominent vendors, and each has been an unmaintainable mess of violated engineering best-practices. This translates to bugs, inhibited (slowed) developer productivity, and inflexibility when adding new features. Tessitura organizations should demand websites that are built to last. Instead, they buy into a wasteful and unnecessary cycle of rebuilding from scratch every few years.
An alternative to vendors is to hire a small, in-house team of web developers. These developers are dedicated to your mission, cultivate familiarity with your business model, and are more likely to write code that they want to live with. This can easily cost less and yield a higher quality web site product. If your organization can hire a team of 3 or more people for marketing, or for press, or for maintaining a box office (for example), then it should hire a team of at least 3 people to maintain and innovate on your virtual storefront.
Finally, whether you're working with a vendor or in-house team, familiarize yourself with the principles of Agile software engineering. Help your organization resist the urge to build a monolithic, "complete" set of features up-front. I recommend reading Chapter 3 of the book, Essential Scrum (http://amzn.com/0137043295).
I hope this helps! Please feel to reach out if you have any questions.
Bryan
One little comment on this great post from Bryan,
SOAP API compatibility may be less of a concern these days, purely out of the fact that it is on its way out, to be eventually superseded by the REST API. (Only the REST API is under active development for new features.) Something to consider also about choice of CMS is that Wordpress is near ubiquitous and there are many more programmers out there that have experience with it.
Also noting that you mentioned TNEW in your original post -- I believe the session key sharing is a feature that the Yale consortium uses extensively, so you may want to talk to them if you are planning to integrate TNEW with your own CMS.
Yes yes. This is just the type of information we were hoping for. Thank you, Nick, for further clarification.