Presenter(s)

Scott Fegette

Chris Charlton

Date

13 March 2010

Tag(s)

#contentmgmtdesign

CMS comes in two flavors: run-time systems (built at each request) and publish-time system (cached at publish time and statically delivered). Different CMS’s give different levels of control over style/theme management. And some CMS’s are easy to deploy, others require more in-depth setup.

Designers are no longer designing for static unchanging interfaces: navigational states, presentational states, logical states, dynamic content. Design hits the road as a “theme” inside a CMS; a theme is an encapsulated design system that allows for fast iteration. A theme is a directory structure with files described by metadata (identifies parts of theme to system).

Designers can use different workflows to get a theme built:

1. Use the default/baseline theme for markup (design inside CSS layer primarily, working ‘within the box’). This does not give a designer control over dymanic classes.
2. Start from an HTML/CSS comp that can be integrated directly into PHP. There are fewer constraints this way, but more risk to a non-code-savvy designer. Also requires learning the API of a system.

Presenter

Paul Annett, clearleft

@nicepaul

Date

Friday, March 13

Sites

podcast

clearleft

These are notes from a session at sxsw interactive. My own take on topics are mixed in with what the presenters were actually saying, so do not assume all of this content is my own.