Sorry, everybody: When I made my comment about WordPress being nerdy, I was confused.
N From: David Collins [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, May 21, 2011 7:31 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [sfx: Discuss] Re: [FRIAM] blog recomendations? It's worth noting that choice of platform can have more impact on social behavior than we might first acknowledge. Wordpress implies primarily a call-and-response narrative that distinguished between content producers and content users. Readers can contribute, but mostly in the form of response to narrative framed by site editors. Mediawiki in its basic format invites user-originated content, but does not promote the classic workflow paradigms that have long assured quality publication -- for example, there's no clean, out-of-the-box provision for pre-publication drafts. As a CMS, it's particularly robust, but it was developed to reflect an ideology of openness now embedded in the software. The way the software associates discussion pages with articles presumes content-production discussions to be open. The software can be modded, but out of the box offers no venue for closed or role-limited editorial discussion. Drupal is more readily configured for granular or even open access to support user contributions to an expanding content base. Drupal could probably be configured to serve as both traditional newsroom workflow management system and a publication platform. But the complexity of the system implies a culture defined by a separation between developers and content contributors. It would take some modular development to allow integration of diverse forms of user-generated data other than text. Hubzero <http://hubzero.org/> provides some of all the above, while providing a platform for sharing of high-level scientific models, and a bit of facebook-style social networking. It too implies the availability of a specialized community of developers. It's open source and free for those who can figure it out, but a $50,000 pricetag for hosted access suggests the level of complexity under the hood. It's certainly not plug-and-play like Wordpress and its more complex by an order of magnitude compared to what may be the leading open-source social networking system Elgg. Each approach has proven to be productive in many ways for various purposes, but the fact remains that choice of content system informs and reflects choices about how we communicate in groups. --- David On Sat, May 21, 2011 at 7:37 PM, Owen Densmore <[email protected]> wrote: I totally agree. For someone not ever wanting their own hosting site, the big three (wordpress.com, blogger, and google sites) certainly make sense. Tumblr was new to me and is getting some nice street cred: http://www.orphicpixel.com/tumblr-vs-wordpress/ Because I *really* would require the ability to move my site from one place to another (maybe no one else cares!), I'd look at: http://codex.wordpress.org/Importing_Content But all in all, the only reason *not* to use wordpress is that it sometimes can require you're writing php for themes. But the newer default theme is not the Huge But Ugly Button theme (Kubrick). The plusses of wordpress are pretty overwhelming: - Easy to import/export - Easy to self host and convert to self hosting later - Lots of folks can help you use it - Gets steadily better every release - Great support for plugins - Great update support -- Owen On May 21, 2011, at 5:07 PM, David Collins wrote: > Dreamweaver and plain old HMTL work great, but they require going outside the CMS for such an ubiquitous feature as user comments though cloud-sourced user comments can bridge that gap. > > Wordpress has features not found in Dreamweaver including tags, feeds, indexing (with on-page indexes) and a super-accessible admin interface, and much much more in plugins. A big site running on Dreamweaver can become daunting to modify if one hasn't anticipated a good approach for configuring site-wide theme elements. > > On Sat, May 21, 2011 at 11:41 AM, Owen Densmore <[email protected]> wrote: > Nice summary. > > BTW: Odd no one suggested simply using Dreamweaver or similar tool. Just plain old fashioned web pages and images up in the cloud work just fine for most folks needing a simple site. > > And I think both Mac and Windows have built-in HTML/Site editors, and also hosting of some sort. > > -- Owen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Santa Fe Complex "discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] <mailto:discuss%[email protected]> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/a/sfcomplex.org/group/discuss -- phone 505-629-2426 Facebook: http://tinyurl.com/dacfbwall davidacollins.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Santa Fe Complex "discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/a/sfcomplex.org/group/discuss
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