Frequently Asked Questions about LiveWhale
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Yes. Video embeds are possible in most WYSIWYG-enabled fields throughout LiveWhale.
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Absolutely.
LiveWhale runs (for the great majority of our clients) on Web servers that they administer themselves; we assist in the installation process, and provide technical support as needed, but our clients have complete access to every line of code in LiveWhale.
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In spirit, yes; technically, no.
As we understand it, the primary ideal behind the open source movement is that openness, partnership and collaboration will inevitably result in better software; we agree wholeheartedly, and we openly and eagerly encourage LiveWhale’s community of users to participate in its evolution.
Unlike traditionally “open source” software, though, LiveWhale is a proprietary product; maintaining ownership of its copyright and intellectual property allows White Whale to invest our resources into LiveWhale on an ongoing, full time basis. But the goal of LiveWhale in general, and of our licensing agreements in particular, is to give our clients the widest possible latitude to work creatively with LiveWhale, and share their insights and discoveries with a wide range of users.
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Definitely.
Because LiveWhale writes standards-based XHTML, in traditionally structured Web configurations, the CMS makes no demands on the structure or design of your page. (The static page content editor does require pages to be valid XHTML, but if they’re not, they are automatically converted to valid code during the editing process.)
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Sure.
The names and specific features of CMS user roles differ from system to system, but the goal’s obvious: to give CMS users permissions that are in line with their abilities and administrative roles. The basic LiveWhale unit of measure is a group; all users within a group work with the same set of news items, images, etc. Control of permissions is granular, with by-user control of access to content modules (page editing, news, events, etc.) Page editing access can be set by group (all users in the Biology group can change all pages within /biology/) or by user (a faculty member user can edit her own page only).
Generally LiveWhale groups are associated with a section of the site (Biology, Academics, Student Activities). Within that area, regular users have full control over what goes live and what doesn’t. They can suggest stories to other groups within LiveWhale, who of course must approve any suggestions before adoption.
In addition to basic users (who have full permissions for the sections they manage), there is a class of users called reporters; reporters can create and share content, but can’t make decisions about what goes live. Although this user is specifically designed for student employees, there may be other individuals within an organization for whom a more limited, moderated role is appropriate.
Top-level users called admins, in addition to having access to set permissions and edit groups, can switch from group to group and manage groups’ content for them. This is helpful for troubleshooting, as well as for helping groups initially populate their sites with content. Admins (who can be created in any number) also have access to additional tools for activity monitoring and content analysis.
Finally: Because LiveWhale works with regular, familiar Web sites on LAMP Web environments— and not complicated, proprietary back end file configurations— your IT staff is free to access the site without LiveWhale. We think the geeks at your institution will like using LiveWhale as much as the departmental administrators do; but if you’d rather log in via FTP to make a change, go for it.
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Not to the extent that some other solutions do.
We know that many commercial CMSs offer the ability to create highly specified workflow processes for different types of managed content; the fact is, workflow is probably the primary area where LiveWhale’s feature set is smaller than that of a typical CMS. Our experience (and our intuition) tell us that the more workflow rigor is built into an automated process, the less individual accountability users feel for the content they manage. So within the pages managed by a LiveWhale group, that group’s regular users have final say over everything that goes live.
One of the primary points of our CMS philosophy is that content management should be done by human beings, not Web applications— the job of the CMS is to make changes easy, and enable the sharing and reuse of content, and not to enforce workflow processes that ought to be working in the real world. In a nutshell, good content management depends on good human communication, no matter how full-featured the CMS is.
There are certainly some workflow models built into LiveWhale. Although groups have full responsibility for managing their own content, notifications of changes and updates are constantly communicated to system administrators, who have the ability to roll any page or dynamic content change back to a previous version or delete it. And calendar events can be submitted by public users (usually after an authentication process for students, faculty and staff) without entering the LiveWhale system.
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Да, конечно!
We are very committed to avoiding software bloat in the service of winning the feature war— as a result, our CMS starts with a basic (but quite complete) set of features, and as additional features are requested by its users, we consider and add them on that basis. Language support is a perfect example.
Since we use the open source WYSIWYG editor TinyMCE for all our stylable text fields (the content of news items and such, in addition to basic page editing), we can handle any kind of content that TinyMCE can handle. There are plenty of language packs available for Tiny that we’d be more than happy to integrate into an installation of LiveWhale.
Because LiveWhale already supports Unicode, many foreign alphabets can be used in text fields. (This question itself was entered using LiveWhale. 한국어로 입력할 수, 예를 들면.)
If modifications to the CMS are necessary beyond simply adding language support to the editor (for example, we might want to associate particular groups or specific users with language packs), we’d add whatever extra code is needed, either in a specific installation for your institution or (more likely) as a plugin for LiveWhale that other clients might use.
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LiveWhale includes built-in support for Google Analytics integration.
Rather than reinvent the wheel, we recommend the use of Google Analytics. It’s full of great features, free of charge and easy to apply to a LiveWhale-powered Web site.
Furthermore, LiveWhale fully integrates with Google Analytics, providing access to statistics from within the CMS, as well as information about how end users found particular web pages with the Google search engine.
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No.
However, since it is a lightweight solution without a lot of arcane system requirements, it works great in tandem with third-party payment gateways.
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The core CMS doesn’t offer this functionality— it’s designed to manage static and dynamic content as simply as possible.
White Whale has built custom applications for this purpose, though, that run alongside the basic LiveWhale CMS. We have several examples of custom apps that do this in various ways.
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Yes! The LiveWhale events module includes online event registration.
LiveWhale includes built-in support for basic RSVP registration for events. Event administrators can use this feature to request additional information from users signing up for an event, and can also place a cap on the number of users who can sign up for an event before registration automatically closes.
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Absolutely. It’s your content, not ours, and we think the process of migration from LiveWhale ought to be as easy as possible.
Exporting all your LiveWhale content to a spreadsheet is as simple as a couple of clicks. And any resources uploaded for use on LiveWhale-powered site— PDFs, images, etc.— are kept on your Web server, available for easy access with or without LiveWhale.
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Not at all.
We’ve designed LiveWhale to be self-standing, and it doesn’t require White Whale’s involvement at all. We do provide upgrades and technical support free of charge; however, there’s no reason why we have to be involved.
If you’ve purchased a permanent license for LiveWhale and your IT staff wants to support it directly, that’s fine— all the application code is clearly documented and easy to modify or extend. (Note, though, that we can’t upgrade or support any versions of the core LiveWhale application that have been modified by our clients.)
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Of course.
White Whale regularly works with schools that have already chosen (or are already committed to) a CMS. In fact, if you’re not going to use LiveWhale, then we’d generally prefer you have your CMS selected when we come on board, as we’ve got experience crafting great sites on any CMS. In the past few years we’ve designed sites implemented in Drupal, WordPress, Ektron, Ingeniux and dotCMS among others. These systems all have their pros and cons, but we’ve been able to create great work on all of them.
We created LiveWhale specifically because we have detected broad dissatisfaction, both among our client base and in the industry in general, with both existing commercial and open source CMS solutions. The former tend to be proprietary, closed systems with nebulous pricing configurations and less than cutting-edge technology; the latter tend to take months to customize and roll out, and the cost of the learning curve adds considerably to the nominally “free” price tag. So we’re trying to shake up the marketplace a bit, by offering something with enormous flexibility, no restrictions on its per-site usage, crystal clear pricing, and active support from the individuals who created it. We’re trying to get at the best of both these worlds.
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Just drop us a line and we’ll get back to you right away.
We are currently making LiveWhale available to customers who hire White Whale to undertake Web redesign projects (of any scope, small or large).
If you are beginning the process of a redesign at your institution, and you’d like to learn more about using LiveWhale to manage content, we urge you to contact us. We’d be happy to talk with you about your needs, and how LiveWhale might fit into a general package of design and development services for your college or university. Please contact Tonya Langford, Vice President, at tonya@whitewhale.net.
If you’re not undertaking a redesign process in the near future, but are interested in LiveWhale nonetheless, that’s great. LiveWhale works perfectly with existing sites; its content management tools can be applied as needed, even on a by-the-page basis, and no massive sitewide operations are required to get rolling. If you’ve contacted us through our Web site, we’ll be sure to keep your information on file, and let you know when demo accounts and screencasts are ready for your review.