Rethinking the Pika CMS home page

There are two web projects at LSNC that are moving toward a point of convergence: The most notable of the moment is the ground work we are doing on managing our knowledge content and making it all “findable” via a Google Search Appliance (GSA), which is being documented at The Findability Project (TFP). The other is an in-progress code updating and design refresh of the Pika case management system we have been using with great satisfaction for the last several years, which in earlier iterations we documented at PikaDocs and more recently (and less extensively) here as part of the great and ongoing Pika~palooza.

One of the great lessons we have learned from the whole Pika experience is that our users really like having a commonly shared page from which to begin their work. To some extent, this appetite for a shared page or portal was meet by the Pika CMS “home” page, which we modified by using WordPress to generate a functional, customizable message or news screen. Back in the day, which is to say a mere three years ago, when we did our first customizations of Pika, that modification meant our using WordPress 1.5, a suitable plugin to dynamically convert the native WordPress RSS feed into HTML post content, and recoding a few Pika files to get WordPress and Pika to cooperate with each other. Fun to do, but it was still real work to get it done.

That was 2005. Three years later we are implementing enterprise search and now very consciously building an organizational shared portal to supplant the Pika home page. Simply put, in our next iteration of Pika, which we hope to have in place early next year, what Pika people know as the home or start page of Pika CMS will go away. The functional utility of the Pika home page will be folded into our emerging shared portal, the point of search and entry to many things, one of which will be Pika. (It will take work to do it, but we also expect to supplant the Pika native search function and substitute a subset of our Google Search Appliance functionality to accomplish the same thing, only better.)

To get feedback, we are constantly tooling with varied options for the shared portal as we test things out with different LSNC offices. For example, we have already modified the temporary TFP search portal we experimented with earlier this week in a presentation to our Sacramento Office. After that event, we reorganized things to emphasize the location of the news feed, moving it from the right side to the left, and created a temporary second search field to heighten user awareness of our “Google Sites” special collections. (In final implementation, all our document collections will be searchable from an integrated single search field, with various options for filtering the search results.)

And what about that LSNC “news” thing on the shared portal page?

In 2005 we had to do some attentive coding to get it to work with the Pika home page. Three years later, all we needed to do was pop the native WordPress 2.6 feed into FeedBurner’s totally freebie Buzzboost feature, click on a button to generate a small bit of javascript, past that script code into the shared portal page, and there you have it — an HTML standards-compliant, fully CSS customizable, full-text news module.