Jay Talbot’s Ramblings

I’ve been thinking about starting a general Sheltie website. The only problem is, I’m not sure what software to use. I have a few things in mind, and as of yet, very few software packages come out-of-the-box with everything that one would need in order to start something like this. I’ll tell you some of my observations about different software packages I’ve tried or implemented.

• Postnuke - A content management system. There are tones of 3rd party modules out there. The drawback? It seems like every new release breaks existing modules. Also, if the developer of a module you rely on quits fixing/updating it, you’re S.O.L., unless you want to take on fixing it yourself. This irritates me so much, I could scream.
• PHPNuke - Another CMS that Postnuke was originally based on. Again, 3rd party modules out the wazoo, but unfortunatly it’s maintained by a single developer and bugfixes and updates come much slower.
• MODx - Fancy AJAX “Web 2.0″ CMS. Very little, if any, modules are publicly available. It has a nice framework, but I don’t want to have to write everything myself.
• Wordpress - It’s a blogging software that supports multiple authors. You can get 3rd party modules are abundant to expand it from a simple blog to much more, but it takes time to find that “just right” set of modules to do anything but make a blog with it.
• MediaWiki - It’s a wiki written in PHP. The thought behind a wiki is that it’s content comes largely from the public, so many wiki packages don’t even have a good access control system (ACS). MediaWiki is popular because it does have an ACS, which helps keep wikiSPAM from becoming a problem. It’s also used at Wikipedia. Since I don’t know everything there is to know about Shelties, it would make sense to use this software, and I’m seriously considering it. The drawback is, unless you already have tons of content available already, people won’t participate. Another problem is that things become political, and I hate politics.

If anyone has anymore suggestions or advice, please leave comments. It sure would help me out. Maybe more later….

Tags: Life, Pets, Technology //