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Today we launched the New England Vegetable Management Guide website.

This site was a challenge because we were tasked with putting a whole book on the web.

The Vegetable Guide is published bi-annually. It is composed by some of the most respected experts from all over New England. 

Formerly, this group of professors used to exchange Word documents through email as they revised the Guide for the next year. Eventually, someone would put these Word documents together and hand them off to a print designer, who would lay everything out in Quark or InDesign.

The process was quite problematic as keeping track of the most  recent Word doc was tough. Lots of changes wound up happening with the print designer. And, like most things, as soon as the book was published, the information was out of date.

Rather than going through that process for the next cycle, the Vegetable Guide team will work through the Joomla website for making all edits and changes. Simply by editing the articles, they can easily update the Guide to have the most recent information, anytime they wish.

Then, when the time comes, they can run a spiffy script that compiles all Joomla articles on the site into a single document that can be opened by Word. That document is then handed off to the print designer to lay out the next version of the book.

It's nice that a CMS can change the workflow such that people at a distance can collaborate more easily while updating the website at the same time.