All posts by pmh

ECM, Open Source

A collaborative open source CMS – Part 1: Early Considerations

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OSCOM3 banner

memories of OSCOM3
It has been almost two and a half years since my visit to OSCOM3, the open source content management conference held at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. OSCOM3 introduced me to some great open source CMS solutions. Since then I’ve used the OSS CMS Plone as a platform for my (now out of date) OSS repository and run Xoops, a decendent of the popular PHPnuke, under VMware on my home PC for fun and amusement.

Now that I’ve got some cycles to go a bit further I want explore some open source CMS solutions for a pet project of mine.

some prerequisites
This project involves setting up a closed (not public) community for a private event. I am looking for the following features:

    o Open source – for cost reasons, but also because of the large number of solutions available driven by active and dedicated developers working with current technologies and able to provide online support.

    o LAMP platform – because Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP are so popular and widespread that good shared hosting services are available and inexpensive. The entry level costs are low and the quality high.

    o Focus on collaboration & community features – there are lots of open source CMSs out there. One list has 95 of them. Each OS CMS development team has their own take on features and priorities. I’m specifically interested in those that stress collaborative features and have good calendars.

    o Easy – to deploy, administer, install additional feature modules, backup, and explain & train.

The last requirement, easy to explain & train, is important because I will need to promote the service in general and I expect these communities will not have experience of whichever open source CMS I select and will need an intuitive interface for basic users and group administrators.

As of today, I have a hosting provider with the preferred LAMP platform (they host this blog, if you hadn’t guessed) and I’ve used the handy-dandy Fantastico installation wizard to install three test sites.

a roadmap
I plan to use this project to discuss open source, content management, and some related best practices in the area of collaboration and perhaps document management. Although this is a small project, I expect it will touch on many points that might be of interest to those who may be selecting and deploying similar sorts of solutions, especially open source.

Oh, which CMSs have I installed? At this point I’m working with Drupal, Joomla, and Xoops. (You’ll notice that open source has a tendency to creative names!). If none of these are on your own CMS of choice, that’s ok. The selection considerations and issues will be of interest to almost anyone working with similar collaboration solutions, whether open source or not.

a point or two
One point: this will not be a How-To of OSS CMS deployment. I’m more interested in the Why. There are lots of technical resources that discuss the plumbing – as a consultant and architect I prefer to stand back from the details in order to look at the bigger picture. I’ll be working on these sites, hands-on… but I’ll only go into the messy details in order to make a point.

A second point: I would have liked to consider Plone, the extremely popular open source portal that runs on top of the Zope Framework. In my case that wasn’t an option because Zope/Plone hosting is significantly more expensive than the hosting services that cater to PHP-based applications. This is because of the higher system requirements necessary to host an application server based on the Python language. In the case of Zope, the database is also likely more demanding than MySQL or PostgreSQL (an OSS alternative to MySQL). I would love to hear from anyone who has done capacity planning for Plone versus PHP-based solutions.

Cheers,
-pmh

Open Source

Stopping Linux Desktop Adoption Sabotage

If you like Linux and conspiracies you’ll love Stopping Linux Desktop Adoption Sabotage, by John H. Terpstra.

It’s a fine three part exposé of IT interests in the West and how the East may win over them.

I once tried to find a Linux driver for an HP printer… only to discover that although the Windows one was well placed on the vendor’s site, there was only a poorly placed reference to an open sourced contribution, by HP itself, with a link to an outside site (!) that specialized on Linux configuration assistance and drivers. It seemed that HP didn’t want to be seen to support Linux on an equal footing with Windows.

Cheers,
-pmh

Emerging

World’s First Tablet-size Flexible Electronic Paper Display

LG.Philips LCD and E Ink Build 10.1″ Flex Display with Production Equipment

This is a very important advance.

During one of his 2005 BBC Reith Lectures Lord Broers was asked what he thought the most important development would be during the first half of the 21st. century. He replied that electronic displays that have the characteristics of a sheet of paper would have a huge impact. Here’s the clip from the lecture’s question period [streamed mp3].

The spin offs from this will extend far beyond wrapping a display around a cell phone. The decendents of the iPod may well have large displays that unfold, but the implications for the electronic display of digital information go beyond that.

Watch this space.
-pmh