Re: Suggestion for the News site

[Joakim Ziegler <joakim ximian com>]

On Fri, Feb 09, 2001 at 08:21:29PM -0500, Miguel de Icaza wrote:

>> With all due respect, Miguel, you seem to not quite know what you're talking
>> about here. I've been seeing what people want to do with the GNOME site for
>> over a year now, and I might have some better idea of this.
 
> Well, as I stated in my mail I might not know what are the solutions,
> but I would get the idea that content management would be based around
> keeping information in a representation-independent location and have
> this mapped into HTML at some point.

Ok. Your alternatives for this are basically either some sort of XML
representation, or a database. Neither will allow you to do
"representation-independent" content, since you'll have to store some level
of HTML-like formatting in the database or XML (unless your XML is very
high-level, like DocBook, but I *really* don't think we want to do that sort
of thing). Not to say that specific parts of the content, like the newsitems
on Gnotices, should be flat HTML files or HTML files with some templates, but
that'll always be specific to each application and subsection of the site.
I've used many of, and looked at about all web content management systems
in existence, at least the free ones, over a span of about 8 years, and let
me tell you, there's no system that does what you want in a general fashion.


> I have seen the Ximian web site and it is one place where there is
> little way of managing content besides building things manually and
> linking things manually.

And it's the only way that works if you're doing something as large as the
GNOME site or the Ximian site. Fancy content management systems are not
general solutions, they're domain-specific, like the Gnotices part of the
site. We tried something slightly more resembling a content management system
on the current site, and it doesn't work. Noone wants to learn it, people
just override it and import their own content, etc. So I'm going for a
minimum resistance solution, where it's easy to take content from a lot of
sources and integrate with a coherent design.

The reason gnome.org has never used a "content management system" beyond
specific domains like Gnotices, throughout its life cycle, and that both
Tuomas and I used PHP templates for the Ximian site, is that there's nothing
else that works. Unless you know of some existing, specific "content
management system" that works better than templates for coherency and CVS for
revision control, you're just coming up with vague general comments that
benefit noone.

-- 
Joakim Ziegler - Ximian web monkey - joakim ximian com - Radagast IRC
  FIX sysop - free software coder - FIDEL & Conglomerate developer
         http://www.avmaria.com/ - http://www.ximian.com/