Wed 5 Oct 2005
“CMS in a Nutshell” describes one community’s process in selecting, installing, configuring, and using an open-source CMS. They selected PostNuke, explaining in detail the steps they took from selecting a CMS (from a pool of many open-source projects) to migrating their “finished” project to the production server.
Last year, we published an article in LTER Databits about our initial experience with PostNuke, highlighting few basic features, yet providing no real depth into the inner-workings of PostNuke or the thought-process behind setting up a CMS. We barely touched the surface of how PostNuke worked for us. The definition of what tools we needed as a community was blurry. Our article was more conceptual in speculating how emerging technologies like blogs and rss feeds could benefit us internally, and also the greater LTER community.
Last month, we published a second article, this time explaining our short-comings with PostNuke and other “failed” experiments with open-source projects. It’s easy to place blame on the projects themselves (a lot of open-source software is clunky) for not meeting our standards, but I think that part of the blame falls on us. We simply didn’t know what we needed, and hence we didn’t know what to look for. Further more, we never set a procedure like mentioned in the above article for installing, configuring, and assigning user-specific roles.
How is it that one community has much success with PostNuke, while another community struggles with it?
The issue here is that first community started with a clearly defined set of goals and deadlines. They knew what they wanted to accomplish and they followed a straight-forward process in reaching their goals. The second community started with a fuzzy definition of what they needed, and hence were unable to get anything off the ground.
Our failure with PostNuke resulted from a lack of recognizing our needs as a community. This caused us to dive blindly into PostNuke with no foresight of how it may or may not work for us. We were turned on by PostNuke’s vast offerings of features, hoping we’d find something that “worked” and would stick. Instead, we were overwhelmed by the many features, and ultimately gave up on the CMS altogether.
This wordpress blog has been a success so far. Even though we are a small community, we had one clearly defined goal when initializing the blog: to post and share information within the community. Because it does only this one thing, and does it well, we continue to use it with comfort. It may not be the most optimal solution for us (e.g. it lacks a file manager), but it’s strong enough to keep us engaged as a collaborative community as we continue to discover other “solutions” out there.
2 Responses to “On PostNuke and CMS”
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October 16th, 2005 at 10:29 am
Thoughts on creating an environment that is comfortable and that faciliates communication, collaboration, and scaling.
Wonder how writing this posting was different from writing the databits article last time - which seemed somewhat tedious compared with the verve evident in this posting. Possibilities: it was premature to write the last databits; there’s a blog space familiarity; the posting benefited from the previous two articles so you now have the strength of an articulated, comparative view; you weren’t saddled with an agenda or a coauthor this time; Jerry provided a prompt at the right time that you could CHOOSE to respond to.
And finally, no worries about preparing a next databits article. You’ve already written it. WIth a few small changes, this posting has done the conceptual and organizational work. Cool.
October 16th, 2005 at 10:37 am
Forgot to mention that I started to write my previous comment as an email response to the blog notification and just caught myself in time. This is an example of the blog is helping specifically with the issue of ‘heterochrony’
that exists. That is, we have a variety of timescales at work with each of us frequently unable to focus at the same time on the same issue. This type posting has preserved an overview synthesis in a way that shares it when a collaborator is ready. And I’ll have time to organize my thoughts around the topic before we talk informally next. This puts us on the same page instead of spending so much of our time catching-up - and you perhaps not recalling the full richness of your insight spur of the moment and me being inarticulate with new thoughts.