I'm going to bring up a CMS for the BitC project. Unless there are really strong objections, I'm going to go with (shudder) Drupal. Drupal frankly scares the crap out of me from a site security standpoint, but we need to move into an environment where we can do a better job of curating the discussion and the process. Drupal certainly isn't the only tool that can do that, but it does have the advantage that bringup is quick and a lot of what we need to do is already supported.
So first: is there a* compelling and inarguable* reason to use a different platform? I'm not interested in "Drupal sucks" or "I like X better" answers. Answers of the form "We need to do X, Y, Z to be effective as a community, and <this CMS> does those things better than Drupal does with lower administrative overhead and lower security exposure" are interesting. But let me be brutally honest: I'm more interested in getting this up and running than I am in getting it perfect. Migration is a bitch, but so is Trinity (http://patterpatter.blogspot.com/2013/12/holiday-house-guest.html). The choices, in my view, are: - Drupal: Has most of what we need, needs a lot of setup to get it tuned - Joomla: Likewise, but doesn't seem to do as much of what we need out of the box (e.g. MathJax). - Plone: More a platform than a CMS. Would take a lot of development effort that I don't want to spend the time on. As I mentioned earlier, I want to move into an environment where we can do more curation of our content. That means: - A mechanism for comments on documents leading toward their improvement/evolution, and a way of deciding when the comments have been addressed and can be removed or marked "historical". - A similar mechanism for discussions, where the outcomes of comments get merged into linearized documents through curation. - Preserving a place for informal discussions, but probably through the CMS rather than email. - A means of differentiating "normative" documents from "non-normative" documents, and differentiating workflows accordingly. - A place where views *other than mine* can be first-class. I'm not going to let go of ultimate administrative authority for legal reasons, but I've stood firm that it's not appropriate for me to edit the words of others. I have kicked abusers off the list, and I've occasionally sent stimulated encouragements to one or two people, but I very firmly believe that your words are yours. - That said, a place where I can sensibly differentiate between the "official" presentation of BitC and the various opinions. Not because the "official" view is better. Simply because it's the view that I'm willing to be accountable for, and differentiating that view from yours is part of making sure that your view can be preserved and supported. Secondary goals would include some ability to support a code browsing interface from mercurial or git, and an issue tracking system. So that's *my* list of goals, and my questions for you are: 1. What really important things have I missed? 2. If we moved from a mailing list to a CMS-based discussion system, would that impact your participation? Positively or negatively? 3. Given these goals, is there a strongly compelling reason to adopt a solution other than Drupal? shap
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