Thanks for the comments on recycling which give me more to ponder (especially helpful now that I have the time in which to do said pondering).
For my next trick, I have just been commissioned to do some work developing online policy discussion mechanisms. I am working up the detailed specification at the moment but am already thinking about the best framework on which to build this. I have been attracted to Plone as a mature and well-structured system. And it has the advantage of being easily installable onto a Mac for development purposes (and perhaps eventual running).
I have spent more time in the past on PHP/mySQL products (including the very fine WordPress which lies behind this blog. A move into Python would be challenging but it does seem to impose lower overheads than PHP and be altogether more concise.
Any ideas and experiences from anyone would be much appreciated as I explore the world of application servers and content management systems.
Plone does seem to be good. The FSF use it for their membership site (though I’ve not been involved in that so I can’t speak from personal experience).
I’ve been working on my own RSS based CMS in Python. Python is a very handy little language, much nicer than PHP which is basically a hack. A cool hack, but a hack none the less.
So, I’d say “yes, go with plone”.
Application Servers
[Source: Post Political Times] quoted: For my next trick, I have just been commissioned to do some work developing online policy discussion mechanisms. I am working up the detailed specification at the moment but am already thinking about the best fr…
Plone is supposed to be pretty good if you can get psat the initial learning curve, same goes for Typo and Xaraya. My current fav is Drupal (drupal.org), a great very easy to hack/extend CMS – and standards compliant (inc WCAG Level AA with a little work on the theme) too.
I’d suggest you try plone – some of the basics (e.g. adding articles, work flow etc) are relatively easy to setup and it’s very powerful.
You will benefit from reading some of the online documentation etc once you try doing something more advanced (e.g. reskinning it or adding custom document types).
If you’re using Debian, I think installation is relatively straight forward (apt-get install plone, then point web browser to localhost:9673 (i think)). You’re welcome to email me for initial help – I’ve setup a few websites, but not done any major reskinning of plone yet.
David.
I’ve seen quite a few small organisations, charities get started very quickly with Mambo, though I haven’t used it myself.
I’ve found all Plone sites look Plone-ish which may or may not be a good thing
See for more on Mambo (I’ve found it impressive when someone gave me a demo)
There are a lot of simple things corporations could do, such as put green die in ashphalt to cut down on global warming. It’s cheap enough, but I don’t see them doing it. A trend of putting lots of plants on the tops of roofs might also cut down on greenhouse gasses.