[Boulder.pm] Perl-based CMSes

[Rob Nagler]

Walter Pienciak writes:
> So . . . this is a fricking HUUUUUGE application space we're
> talking about.

As you know, I would pick one group that you know you can work with,
and get them to use something.

Here are two recent examples:

BVSDWatch.org just launched, and uses Mambo.  I spoke to the guy who
put it together, and it's really quite impressive what you can in a
short time.  Mambo is PHP, which has its downsides.

OpenBVSD.org uses bOP, which is Perl.  It doesn't look nearly as good
as BVSDWatch.org.  OTOH, it was easy (through EasyForm) for us to
create some pages that do something whereas BVSDWatch.org couldn't
create a petition, for example. 

I'm personally moving rapidly away from Web-based content management
systems.  I don't think the Web is a very good at building GUIs, and
every site has a different UI.  (AJAX is just making this worse
imiho.)  Yes, you can do it, but it is more work, than, say using
DreamWeaver or Word to create a site for the end-user.  Native
interactivity goes away, and you aim for the lowest common
denominator, rather than the best tool for the particular CMS task.

We are building a CMS into bOP, but it is very low-tech.  The
interface is WebDAV, which integrates with most Web site development
software.  Versioning will be dead simple: store all the previous
versions, and allow people to drag-n-drop them via WebDAV.  If people
want to "diff" them, they'll use native tools, e.g. Track Changes in
Word.

One of the reasons we added EasyForm to bOP was to allow ordinary
folks the ability to create forms.  The output is stored in CSV format
along with additional fields like remote IP, user email, and
date/time.  They can add whatever fields they like at any time.  This
allowed us to get the blade.org contact form going very quickly.  It's
all editable via WebDAV, and you can see who the contacts are via
WebDAV, and see if you have any errors in your forms via WebDAV.

The next major item in this work is to create an RSS feed for "recent
items" so that when, say, a new mail item comes in or a new calendar
entry, you get to see it come up in a list.  We already have and RSS
feed for the Calendars, and we use Sunbird to edit them with their
nice shared calendar feature.

We have plans to interface the mail system via HTTPMail, which allows
people with Outlook and Thunderbird to read the mail archives any
forum natively including searching, sorting, etc.  People won't have
to change contexts to read their mail from our forums, and more
importantly, they won't have to write a filter to put all their mail
coming from forum X into folder X.  They probably won't even have to
subscribe, just click on the Forum folder and it's there when you want
to read it.  This will probably reduce the load on our servers,
because not everybody reads every message, and when people go away,
they won't send vacation mail to everybody. ;-)

In summary, I think most CMSes are ill-suited, because they try to
solve every content creation problem *again*, when in reality, there
are perfectly good solutions already out there that people are used.
With our approach, we avoid the religious wars of what is good and
what is bad.  If people want to use vi to create their forum's
website, more power to them!

My $.02, since you asked. :-)

Rob