[Glastonbury] demo CMS sites for members

[Martin Wheeler]

[I've been trying for a whole week now to put together a few mails 
relevant to last week's meeting, but have been constantly disrupted by 
other things; so here goes at last: ]

At last week's meeting, I talked briefly about different CMS systems -- 
principally Drupal, Zope CMF, Zope plone and phpWebSite; and tried to give 
an explanation of how and where I would use each.
[Not helped by a projector with a mind of its own about whose laptops it 
likes!]

To recap, I would use:

- DRUPAL (quick'n'easy to install) for collaborative document generation 
by a small team (2-6) of editors, where everyone has equal editing powers;
[e.g. let's write a book on a single topic we all know about -- everyone 
can edit/blow away anyone else's work]

-ZOPE CMF (hideously steep learning curve to get your head round Zope as a 
publishing environment) as a simple clean interface for a larger group 
(e.g. government department size) wishing to publish members' individual 
contributions to a many-faceted community project;
[e.g. let's produce a bunch of papers on related or themed topics where 
each of us is an area specialist -- everyone edits only their own work]

- ZOPE PLONE as a seemingly bog-standard, wishy-washy, "the visual 
interface sends me to sleep" content management system of the type much 
more excitingly implemented by PHP-Nuke, PostNuke, et al.
[e.g. train-spotting community's friendly CMS. Yawn.  Single overall 
editor, but community members can control their own pages]

- PHPWEBSITE (easy to install and set up) for large community projects 
with multiple editors (or even teams of editors), covering many disparate 
areas of interest.
[e.g. town or local government *interactive, community* website, split 
into lots of individually edited sections]


As soon as I got home from the last meeting, I set up demo versions of 
each of these packages for group members to play with (plus a few others, 
like various wikis and weblogs, etc.); and until such time as we can get 
these on the group website (we need root access), they're currently 
accessible on my trusty desktop server:

           http://startext.demon.co.uk/

[NOTE: there is NO "www" in the above.  If you have a 'user-friendly' 
browser which automatically inserts this for you -- shoot it.
"www" is soo-o-o fin de siecle dotcom; know what I mean?]

Oh -- you also have to read the //whole// index page.
To my chagrin, I find that most readers hardly ever bother to scroll down 
the text with their web-browsers -- they usually just read what's visible, 
as it first appears on screen, then move on to the next page.
[///True///  I watch the buggers doing it constantly in the classroom.]


Another discovery I've made since the meeting is ZMS -- another Zope 
product intended for scientific, medical and technical publishing, and a 
massively welcome relief from the blandness of plone.  And easier to set 
up and edit from a web-browser.
I've put a copy of that on the site too, so feel welcome to play.
(I like it so much, I'm probably going to replace publishing with the 
Movable Type weblog with publishing under ZMS.)

Most sites are editable using the ID lugog for both login and pass; some 
may not be as yet, but I'm working on it.

Let me know how you get on.

Cheers,
-- 
Martin Wheeler   -   StarTEXT / AVALONIX - Glastonbury - BA6 9PH - England
mwheeler at startext.co.uk                http://www.startext.co.uk/mwheeler/
GPG pub key : 01269BEB  6CAD BFFB DB11 653E B1B7 C62B  AC93 0ED8 0126 9BEB
       - Share your knowledge. It's a way of achieving immortality. -