On Thursday 22 March 2007, Ohad Lutzky wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I've just had the dubious pleasure of updating the Haifux Website.
> Mountains of perl scripts and makefiles, a very inconvenient system.
> My suggestion: Wordpress. It's a 'weblog' application written in PHP,
> but from my experience with it - it would be perfect for our needs. It
> supports uploading files, tagging (for example, by lecturer), and is
> much easier to update.
>
> While this is Free software which can be installed on Vipe, it might
> be beneficial - if this is, in your eyes, acceptable - to use
> Wordpress.com for hosting - it's free, with no ads, and one only needs
> to pay for upgraded storage, as they only give 50MB for free.
>
> What do you think of this?

Hi Ohad!

I can imagine that the Haifux' site is messy. However Telux ( 
http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/telux/ ) uses a WML+Latemp system, which is much more 
consistent, flexible, modular and extensible. I re-used Website Meta Language 
( http://thewml.org/ ), Perl 5 and some CPAN modules and created a lot of 
logic above which I released as open-source. For the sites that use it see:

http://web-cpan.berlios.de/latemp/examples/

The most complex Latemp-based site is:

http://www.shlomifish.org/

Note that it generates completly static HTML. If necessary you can use a 
different static HTML generator like Perl's Template Toolkit. See 
http://xrl.us/vft4 for more options.

WordPress as nice as it is, is still a PHP server-side application. Such web 
applications and PHP in particular suffer from several maintenance problems:

1. They require updates to make sure they have no vulnerabilities. (Zero day 
exploits aside). Such vulnerabilities include SQL injection, cross-site 
scripting, privilege escalation, etc.

2. They require spam protection.

3. They generally require much more maintenance overhead than a set of static 
HTML pages.

4. Static HTML pages can have a consistent, great and modern look and feel by 
using CSS and generating the HTML from templates (as I'm doing using WML and 
Latemp). So using PHP for everything is not necessary

5. Most people find that their CMS or web application does not do all they 
want. Many of the people on http://www.webdesign-l.com/ said they ended up 
rolling their own CMS (and I was no exception with Latemp).

---------------------

If we use Wordpress.com then we (at least partially) eliminate #1 and 
hopefully #2 and #3. However, I suggest that you try either refactoring the 
existing ad-hoc "CMS" or instead switch to a different static HTML CMS. Do we 
really need anything based on server-side scripting? Static HTML is fast, 
light on resources, and requires less maintenance on the server. But PHP 
requires a lot of maintenance. More money - more trouble (or in 
Hebrew "Marbeh Nekhasim - Marbeh De'agah").

Regards,

        Shlomi Fish

P.S: New signature quote, BTW. Chuck Norris kicked the ass of the previous one 
in which he was featured. It didn't survive, and instead had to be replaced 
by the new one.

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Shlomi Fish      [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/

If it's not in my E-mail it doesn't happen. And if my E-mail is saying
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    -- An Israeli Linuxer

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