Re: [Dfey-nw-discuss] CMS for website

[Robert Leverington]

On 2009-07-22, Tim Dobson wrote:
> Sorry for the slowish response - as you know I was giving a presentation  
> on DFEY at Becta's Open Source Schools Unconference and I spent a lot of  
> time I should have spent doing things/answering email, writing and  
> practising my talk.
>
> Well first it would be helpful to look at our requirements and what  
> other organisations with similar requirements have done.
>
>
> One thing that might be worth bearing in mind is the consideration that  
> it might not necessarily be desirable to have user accounts.
>
> If we look at an organisation which uses wordpress - Manchester Free  
> Software Group - http://manchester.fsuk.org - we can see that the actual  
> people who update it are very few - I have credentials to add articles  
> etc. but I wouldn't consider adding the latest article on my blog -  
> apart from it not really being keeping with the nature of the blog, I'd  
> instantly get lynched (it's a metaphor!) from the other members of group  
> who might feel I was not expressing my views in the right place.
> Equally I'd feel the same way if someone else wrote an article on it  
> about their favourite programs on "linux".
>
> I think teenlinux.com is offline/a holder page but if we look back a  
> months on the internet archive, they are using drupal.
>
> They were a single community, online and but it's crucial to note that  
> only a few limited people could and would write things onto the front 
> page.
>
> I've not looked at teensonlinux.com for a while, but as a 'rival' (in  
> the very broadest use of the term) online teenage linux community, they  
> adopted joomla.
>
> But these are not organisations who we share many great similarities  
> with structurally...
>
> lug.org.uk - UK Linux User Groups - are a group of disparate local area  
> groups provided with infrastructure, support and to some degree,  
> direction, I feel to some extent represents more where we stand.
>
> I feel that a simplistic static homepage structure - as offered by  
> poliglota, offers a good basis for our homepage and what we do.
>
> Thoughts?

You make some interesting suggestions, that seem to me to be quite
sensible.  If we go for a more static site there won't be the need to
monitor who is updating it since all the content will be agreed upon in
advanced (we could use pages on the wiki to organise this, but I haven't
really thought that through).  Furthermore agreeing upon all the content
before posting it live is likely to significantly reduce drama
considerably.

The general idea we discussed on IRC was that we would use the CMS for a
news feed and having a few static pages, but thinking about it further it
seems unlikely that there will be so much news and a firm system for
managing static content seems the way forward.

Robert