DUE Wednesday, Mar 21 – 4 points
(Thursday NOON deadline)

For this assignment, you will need to read the following items from the book and from the web.

• Taking Control
  This eighth chapter of the Website Owner’s Manual looks at content management systems.

• Open source development – an introduction to ownership and licensing issues
  WordPress, the content management system will be using as an example in this course, is released under an open source license known as “the GPL.” This article provides a brief overview of open source in general and the GPL in particular. The quiz questions will come from sections 1, 2, 3, and 6.

Once you have completed the reading, you will need to take a quiz of ten true-false questions. (These questions will be randomly selected from the questions below. You can retake the quiz up to five times. Don’t stress about getting 100% on these quizzes: if you get 80% or better, you will be ready to proceed to the next activity and I will give you the full 3 points.)

All questions should be prefaced with an understood, “According to the author of the material … “:

1. T/F? If you can use a word processor, you can edit a web site with a content management system.
2. T/F? Most content management systems run in the browser, so web site owners and editors can manage the web site from anywhere with an internet connection.
3. T/F? Even with a content management system, updates to the site navigation still have to made to every single web page on the site separately.
4. T/F? Most content management systems give you some control over permissions, making it possible to restrict who can edit which pages.
5. T/F? Most content management systems use templates, which help keep the design and presentation consistent while different people are editing the content.
6. T/F? Content management system are often implemented to solve what is really an organizational problem, not a technological problem.
7. T/F? Paul mentions Dell’s web site as an example of a site that uses one single platform so that visitors only have to log in one time to access all the site’s functionality.
8. T/F? Most commercial content management systems appear massively complex because they include functionality that few people use.
9. T/F? Most content management systems make it easy for you to export your content in a standard format, so switching from one CMS to another is usually fairly straightforward.
10. T/F? Paul mentions ExpensiveCMSTrial.com, a web site for demoing many of the top commercial content management systems on the market.
11. T/F? Paul believes the visual editor in WordPress should be replaced with something that encourages more semantic markup.
12. T/F? Approximately half of site visitors begin with search when looking for content on larger web sites.
13. T/F? Some content management systems do not allow customizations; you have to use one of the templates that come with the CMS.
14. T/F? Most web sites need a content management system with multilingual support.
15. T/F? One of the benefits of using an popular CMS software package (instead of a building a custom one) is that you are not tied to a single service provider.
16. T/F? Desktop applications like Dreamweaver, FrontPage, or iWeb should only be used for publishing web sites that change infrequently.
17. T/F? Many blogging applications have expanded beyond blog posts to allow for pages in a hierarchical structure.
18. T/F? Blogging applications like WordPress are only suitable for personal web sites: they are not professional or sophisticated enough for even small company web sites.
19. T/F? Modern content management systems produce “friendly URLs,” web addresses that are easy for site visitors and search engines to read and understand.
20. T/F? Paul discourages companies from using open-source content management systems because they do not offer formal support and training.
21. T/F? “Open Source Software” is software for which the source code is made available for everyone who has the software to see, distribute, and modify.
22. T/F? The GPL requires anybody who produces a modification of the software and releases it must also release its source code under the GPL.

DUE Wednesday, Mar 21 – 4 points
(Thursday NOON deadline)