Daniel Marino

Working Around the CMS

The other day I completed a single-page project at work. Nothing fancy or special about it. It did force me to think outside of the current-web-standards box though.

We use a custom content management system – a really bad one at that. I don’t really know too much about it because I don’t use it – that’s someone else’s job. I just design the stuff. I do know that the CMS strips out certain HTML tags (including the link tag), Style definitions, and JavaScript – well, sort of. I can use inline styles and JavaScript.

The layout was simple enough that I could get away with using div tags for layout, with some minor inline styling. If the layout had been anymore complicated, I would have resorted to using tables. I know what you’re saying, but believe me – I don’t like it any better. I’ve used tables before to get projects done and I’ll probably have to use them again in the future.

For the navigational roll overs, I had to use the onMouseOver and onMouseOut commands to swap out images in order to achieve the desired effect. Oh yeah – I can’t preload the images either because I can’t define any JavaScript within the page or link to a JavaScript page. The navigational images are all less than 1.5k so there’s a slight delay, but I can live with it.

Since I’d have to declare inline styling within every tag, I kept styling to a minimum to help keep the weight of the page down. For instance, you’ll notice that the links are all default colors, except for the Back to top links.

There are other issues with the CMS, like it strips out the closing li tags, it stripped out the background image, and I can’t set the margins and padding for the body tag at zero. Bummer.

I choose to follow web standards as often as possible, but when you’re working for the man (or a poorly designed CMS) sometimes you need to be flexible. I’ve talked with some of the people in our IS department, and they’re not idiots. They know about web standards and current web technologies. Our own website follows standards, for the most part. For what we normally use our CMS for, the company hasn’t been able to justify investing the time and resources to fix or replace our CMS.

So what does this mean? I don’t really know. I guess it means I’m at the mercy of a poorly designed CMS.