Re: Proposal for building knowledgebase website. - Mailing list pgsql-www

> > > Now, if you can throw together something in a couple of
> hours, that
> > > satisfies everyone's concerns ... ?
> >
> > When I suggested that was possible I got shot down in flames <sob>
>
> I've had all too much experience using CMSes which were
> "thrown together in a couple of hours" lately.  The WYSWYG
> editing is the easy part -- there are several OSS components
> to do that.
>  What requires work and *considerably* more than
> a couple hours of troubleshooting includes:
>
> Permissions (like, can any author edit any article, or only
> the author who wrote it, or only editors?)

I was envisioning something really simple in this department - anybody
who sign up can write. And the same ppl who can approve news and events
can approve articles.
An edited article becomes a new version of it, and the new version has
to be approved to sho wup. When approved, the old one is replaced.

> Authentication

Yes, this is a problem. And it's a problem for bric, or any other CMS.
Because they will provide authentication to the CMS, which means if we
want authentication for anything else we either have to push that into
the same CMS (which we may or may not want), or we have separate sets of
userid/password combos - which sucks bigtime.


> Navigation

Indeed. And a CMS does *not* solve this. It helps doing so - but so does
our current templating system. My experience is rather the opposite - a
CMS makes this *harder*, because it often contains fixed assumptions
about what you want.

> Moderation (who can approve articles and how?)

See above.

> File Uploads

You mean for attached images etc? Yes, that is the difficult one.

> Author Attribution

Not sure I follow you here.


> A mature CMS (like Bricolage) handles these things in a
> user-tested manner.  A 2-hour CMS wouldn't handle them at
> all, instead counting on a WWW-admin to fix things whenever
> they get broken -- which would be every day.

You clearly have a different experience with these mature CMSes than I
do. The ones we use at work certainly need a lot more handholding than
the homegrown ones, because they do things *their* way and not *our*
way.


> The idea of using something like Bricolage for TechDocs is
> that when it becomes popular, nobody on this list necessarily
> needs to be involved in
> day-to-day operation.   That is, you designate a few trusted
> authors as
> moderators, and they take care of moderation and "burning".
> The only time you get involved is if the CMS-->CVS gateway
> breaks down.

Except for the manpower to maintain the CMS. But if you have this
manpower available then sure, I'm not against it. As long as it
integrates with the site enough that things like template changes don't
break it (which it seems would not be a problem if you use bric and push
it into the cvs tree etc). I'd also very much like to see an
authentication system that can be reused for other parts of the site - I
hav eno idea if this can be done with bric (couldn't with any of the
other CMSes I've worked with, but I haven't tried bric)

I'm certainly not against using a ready-made CMS on principle. I just
think it'll end up with more work than people expect.


//Magnus