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.
