One of the highlights of my time here at J-school has been meeting Cyndi Stivers, currently the managing editor of Entertainment Weekly. Stivers launched Time Out here in New York as publisher and is now teaching a class on magazine production at the J-school.

We met after the “dog-and-pony” show, where professors of spring classes pitch their upcoming courses to fall students, and quickly hit it off on the topic of content management systems. I never thought of myself as too knowledgeable on the subject, but after having helped design an online system in Django, City Weekend, I suppose I’m keenly aware of their power and menace. Stivers expressed interest in me stopping by her class and presenting my former work.

The above slide show is the result. It’s a short dek that simply touches on what is a CMS, what to look out for when choosing one and how the right CMS or approach to database management can help in magazine and web production. As I am so fond of saying, our CMS published a user-generated Web site, that also happened to make a magazine, email update and mobile phone service.