[Sigia-l] CMS recommendations

[Troy Winfrey]

I currently work as a Web assistant at a medium-sized university. Our site
currently uses a home-grown CMS that, while adequate, is not suitable to
"post-brochure" sites. We are in the process of defining requirements for a
new system, and I wanted to ask the list for opinions. We are open
to commercial and open-source options.
The new system needs to support complete control over navigation and
architecture--no "auto-dumping" of new pages into the nav. It needs to
support hidden (not appearing in the nav) pages; a Google Mini search
solution (which shouldn't be too hard to implement); full ability to modify
page source, which helps editorially and also in terms of search
optimization; and some kind of editorial notification and control
capability. This might be an alert that a new page has been created and a
"bullpen" of pages awaiting editorial permission to go live, for instance.
We are most concerned about the IA and search/search marketing aspects of
any proposed system, having seen too many systems that shoehorn
"information" into rigid categories "designed" by engineers. We would like a
nav that could be completely rearranged based on the results of formal user
inquiry, for example. Tech specs have been left vague since we are capable
of hosting a broad spectrum (perhaps too broad) of solutions.
Target audience for the system will be a few highly-trained users with final
editorial authority and sophisticated understanding of interactive
marketing, XML and JS code, and/or IA and IxD, and probably as many as a
dozen trained but not especially expert content contributors from various
subject areas/academic departments. Most of these contributors will not
spend more than 3-5 hours a week updating content.
Thank you all in advance for your suggestions!

Troy