Re: Hello and some questions

On Tuesday 16 December 2003 17:07, Josh Berkus wrote:
> Robert,
>
> > 3b) Move any remaining bits of techdocs into a new architecture (current
> > is crufty php manually maintained) I personally think it should be
> > openacs, but even homebrew php done correctly would be a major upgrade.
>
> The problem is that OpenACS is an architecture, it's *not* a content
> manager.

The problem is that everyone talks about what needs to be done but no one
actually does anything...

> Honestly, my first thought when Justin "handed over" techdocs to
> me (not that I;ve done anything with it) was to contact the OpenACS folks
> and see if there was a full-service CMS built on OpenACS. There's not.

I'm no openacs expert, but there are multiple CMS packages available. Whether
they meet your definition of "full featured" I couldn't say.

>
> Also, Bricolage's setup of generating static files from dynamic content
> should work a lot better with our site setup. It would mean that the
> majority of the Techdocs material could be mirrored just like the rest of
> www.

yep, thats a bonus, though given we don't serve developer, techdocs, or
advocacy through the mirror system now, I wouldn't think that its a terribly
high priority. A better feature would be openacs 5.x support for
internationalization, which IIRC we won't be getting with bric.

>
> If I end up running Techdocs, or if Elein does (I've suggested it becuase
> of the amount of energy she's put into General Bits) we're going to want a
> real CMS so that we don't spend time debugging HMTL/PHP that could be
> better spent managing authors and writing.

This is too rich. As the guy who has actually been stymied on several attempts
to move techdocs into the future, and the one who is actually updating the
content now, please let me know when one of you two is ready to "start
running things". You seem to think that there is some floodgate of authors
writing articles with no way to get them on-line... I just don't think thats
the case. Techdocs works better when the casual passer by can post responses
and updates to articles on the fly, building upon others body of work. This
is why the guides portion has done well, but the downside to using the
wiki software is that you generally have no good way to publish content that
you want to remain static. acs gives you both of these things, which is why i
think it's worth investigating. But as I said before, even homebrew php
done correctly would be a big improvment over the code we have now. Right now
1/2 the site is straight files, 1/2 is coming from a database that's laid out
badly and theres little to no interface into the database other than a
mismatched version of psql...
<sigh>
but all of this is secondary to getting Andreas code finished up so we can
begin unifying the various websites. Thats where we really need to
concentrate because it is the roadblock to new development...

Robert Treat
--
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