So, it’s been three weeks and I’ve made some interesting progress on exploring the idea of having an Ironworks community portal on the Internet. About two weeks ago, Darin, Jai and I got together to discuss and decide on what we wanted to pull together. I’ve done some storyboarding, and have been keeping my ear to the ground to see if there are any interesting news in prepackaged CMS software. Read on for developments.
Storyboards
I’m placing these up-front because pictures have a way of explaining things a lot quicker than words—especially when I’m writing. Incidentally, I did these mockups in Microsoft Visio 2002, a program for which I’ve found much affinity. Vector graphics rule, and if I had attempted to do these mockups in any other graphics package, it would have taken me at least twice as long.
he first diagram is my mental picture of the Ironworks home page. It’s simple, and perhaps too much so, but I thought I’d get it out there. The couch thing is just meant to be clever, not gimmicky or confusing. The image would have to eventually be a real picture rather than clip art, of course. I’ve had this idea running through my head that goes something like, “Ironworks.org: the rooms are virtual, but the relationships are not.” Something like that. The whole site should be an expression of “realness” rather than “trying-to-be-real-ness.” In other words, there will be no “Church Family, Relevant Faith, Real Life…” banners. The content to the right of the diagram is a teaser excerpt from Don Everts’ Jesus with Dirty Feet, a book I highly recommend. Since I gave the book to a friend, I had to copy this page out of the preview content at Amazon. 
At any rate, the underlined elipsis at the end of that excerpt would lead to more Gospel content.
The second diagram is what the user will see after logging into the site. This is the content-rich portion, obviously, with links to different parts of the site including message boards, calendar, people’s profiles, etc. The home page, currently displayed, would have “news” items, as well as summary information in a sidebar. This will be especially helpful for our calendar application, as users will be able to see upcoming (30 days in advance or so) events, including birthdays. The Who’s Online portion shows any other users currently logged into the site and allows the user links to chat with them.
Meeting
Notes from the meeting on 3/12:
==
- Requirements & Brainstorming
- Calendaring (ext): a shared calendaring system
- Profiling (int): the ability for people to save and share personal information (such as birthdays, email, etc.)
- Editing
- Viewing/Exporting
- Secure
- Message Board (int): um, a message board
- News Blog (int/ext?)
- Events
- Scripture for Bible Study
- “Static” Content (ext?): content that doesn’t change very often
- About Us/Vision/etc.
- Gospel
- Worship
- Open Source: free, community-maintained software
- Repackagable
- Cheap
- Chat (int): um, chat software
- Possible URLs (pronounced: yerls‘)
- iron-works.net, org
- soulfoundry.org
- iw.org, net
- iwcommunity.org, net
==
Technology
From a feasibility analysis perspective, this all is do-able given lots of time and resources. We have neither, which is why I want to use a prepackaged CMS system. As I had mentioned previously, I’ve been keeping an eye out for such systems. My initial inclination was to go with a package called PostNuke, which seemed to offer all of the things that I’d mentioned in my previous blog. However, I caught wind of some unsettling information about PHP Nuke—the code on which PostNuke is based. The first of these was that PHP Nuke is apparently very hackable. I had visited one site that was supposed to be about PostNuke development and discovered this image on the site, indicating that the site had been broken into. Lovely. The feeling that PHP Nuke was easy to crack was further confirmed when one of the Slashdot editors made a subtle joke in a recent post about PHP5 (read the “from the…dept” tagline).
If that wasn’t enough, I also read an announcement that PHP Nuke is going closed-source with the next rewrite of their code. I understand that they’ll still give it away for free, but it struck me as a reactionary trend on the part of the developers to think that closing the source code for PHP Nuke will make it more secure. This is one of Microsoft’s arguments against Open Source software in general, and it’s generally an unfounded notion. Suffice it to say that I am thoroughly dissatisfied with the *Nuke platform.
But, then I go to Ryan Abrams’ site last night and discover that he’s done another overhaul. It appears that he’s installed a completely new content managment system called Plone—a package I had not heard of yet. According to the Plone site, the software will let the architect do a lot of things that are listed in our requirements for the Ironworks site with a minimum of fuss. Some things are not mentioned (such as a message board or chat), but this looks promising—I recommend watching the presentation by the Government of Hawaii about midway down the page. Ryan, if you have any insight as to your experience with Plone, I’d be interested to hear it!
Hey Ken!
Yeah, Mike and I are chugging away on setting up a new dedicated server for our nefarious uses. Plone was actually mike’s discovery.
I have gone on to setup movabletype for my site flipsidejones.net, as it’s a blog, and thats what movabletype does best.
Plone will remain around for use on dcindustrial.net, so you can watch it evolve there (it’s the next big step)
Positives:
This app actually runs cbs news and a few other huge sites… it’s that good.
It relies on Zope, so a lot of the core stuff is already handled and works site wide (i.e. add ZWiki and the plone users can login to the wiki with the same password… single sign on rules)
Negatives:
It relies on Zope – which gives it a rather large footprint, and some mega crazy setup. It’s doable, but its no movabletype install… it’s more like installing linux.
It’s huge. The preconfigured stuff is amazing, but changing the templates and styles requires /deep/ knowledge of the system, and probably a bit of python work too. I am not sure exactly how difficult this will be because I have yet to modify the dcindustrial.net homepage to the old style (which I will be doing soon) – But it doesn’t look easy from just poking around.
Anyway, sorry for the huge comment here. Just wanted to give you feedback. I will try to blog about my progress once in a while, as I start to know more about it. I would suggest that if Ironworks is going to be a large/busy site, plone may be your answer – zope is a great backend, and plone is great for community CMF.
Stay away from PHP-Nuke, PostNuke and derivatives. They are bug riddled, and generally 75% done throughout – lots of workarounds and opportunities to be exploited. I do know the fellow who helped for PostNuke off and get it pushed into new, better forms. I could have him email you and give you his pitch if you like.
Content Management is a big hotspot of activity in the open source world at the moment. Plone has the most buzz, and is one of the most scalable and mature options. The latest iteration of the PHP Nuke line (some weird name I cant remember) is looking good and may have had its security cleaned up… there are others, but if you choose one of those two, you really wont go wrong.
Yeah. Plone rocks. Zope Rocks. The possibilities with them are endless. They are both Open Source (GPL), Systems. Zope by itself is not a CMF. You alsoneed to install ZopeCMF, where you cna start building your own system or go with a ready made one like Plone.
The options in plone and zope are mind boggling, but, easy to learn. Its just that there is a /lot/ to learn. There is a lot of trial and error involved at first … And i hope you know DHTML, CSS, and are willing to dabble in python if you want to get really fancy. I’ve been playing with zope for almost a year now, and am still jsut getting my feet wet. its a massive, massive system. But it works very well with apache (you can have zope, zope/plone, zope/static, static combinations with virtual domains and such. As ryan mentioned, our new box is running it and we are running all kinds of stuff, not just zope … there are several systems involved …)
and download the zope book if you get into it. Its a Free download from their website.
http://www.zope.org
http://www.zopelabs.org (there are a log of tutorials on this page)
http://www.plone.org
Catch me on IM if you have a question about it
Mike.
Hehe. Just wanted to add that configing it isn’t hard – but it’s scary. There is a lot of template stuff going on, but moving it around and such is pretty easy actually, once you get the hang of it.
Since my last comment, I have already gotten dcindustrial.net very close to where i want it. So that gives you the idea of the level of difficulty.
Ryan, just wanted to let you know that the long comment is not a problem. Thanks for the feedback!