Content Management Systems

After reading up on ruby on rails, I came to the conclusion that although Rails would probably work for me, it's just to involved. I've been playing with the internet since the early nineties, and as it's proliferated I've seen certain tools reappearing. For instance, many websites utilize very similar forum engines. Same thing with blogs. After thinking about it, it occured to me that there had to be existing tools that would allow me to create a website using a template or something. Given the popularity of open source culture I knew that somewhere out there someone had done most of the coding work for me.

It started with tag clouds. I want my website to be driven by user-generated content, and figured it might justify the use of a folksonomy might be justified, over a predetermined list of categories decided upon by me. By to manage this folksonomy I wanted to associate tag clouds with entries, but I had no idea how to code a tag cloud.

I started searching for a place that would just tell me how to make a tag cloud. I ended up learning that tag clouds are common not because the code for them has been popularized, but because tools for creating blogs have been.

Enter Wordpress. When I first learned about Wordpress and Wordpess MU, I stood up from my computer and screamed "I KNEW IT!" at the window. I knew that many websites for creating blogs existed, but Wordpress was my first exposure to a downloadable Content Management System, a software package that would help me make a community driven webpage out of the box.

The problem with Wordpress is that it's really aimed at blogs. After learning about Wordpress I rode the wave of my initial excitement and tried to figure out ways I could implement my idea with a series of blogs. Wordpress is really only designed for single or very few blogs. Wordpress MU supports multiple blogs, but I wanted my users to collaborate more than would be easy to do with Wordpress.

Through wikipedia, I learned about other CMSs. The two heavy hitters aside from Wordpress are Joomla and Drupal. All three are open-source GPL which is great for me. Joomla and Drupal are real heavy hitters. After browsing through some comparisons of the two, I think Drupal's flexibility is what I need. Next week I'm going to attend a monthly DC Drupal meetup to learn more about it.