On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 4:32 AM, Heiko Schulz wrote:
> *Hi all,***
> *I installed Joomla! yesterday on my page, for making a example of what
> could be flightgear.org in the next time.*
>
This is a "me too" post. :-) I have also installed joomla-1.5 here:
http://www.flightgear.org/joomla/
What you will find there is the originally installed default "content".
However, joomla does look pretty cool and if we want to explore this
direction, we could have people register and start playing around with
content management.
Here are a couple thoughts from a devil's advocate perspective:
1. Joomla adds an extra layer of management between the actual content and
how it gets presented to web visitors. The actual content and site settings
are stored in a mysql database.
Question: what if our "joomla" site gets hacked some how and vandalized?
How easy is it to roll back changes and restore a site after it's been
damaged? With our current system it's real easy ... I just rerun the web
site rsync command and yell at the ISP to fix the security hole. If the
problem is all contained within our mysql database and user managment
system, then that could be harder to deal with. These are things we'll have
to explore, but I assume there is a way to backup the entire site off line
and restore it later if there is a problem? We supposedly have that
capability with our phpbb forum, but the restore side of this has never been
tested. Security and recoverability and fixability is something we need to
consider if we were to make an official move from a simple system to a far
more complex system.
2. Simplicity versus complexity. For a long time I displayed a "powered by
vi" banner on my personal home page. That was somewhat intended in humor,
but it was also at least half true. My site was actually powered by a
combination of vi + emacs.
Modern, highly complex systems can be great, but they can also turn into a
nightmare if something (even something small and simple) goes wrong.
We live in a culture that lives for the next gadget, then next feature, the
next release. For most of us newer is automatically better. The more
flashy, the more technically complicated, the more features, the more
gadgets ... the better. The other approach is to value "tried and true", to
value things that are well tested and have proven themselves over the course
of suffcient time.
I'm not saying this to setup an argument for or against anything, I'm just
saying that we need to keep a healthy perspective of the tradeoffs, the
risks, and the potential difficulties if we were to move forward with it.
You probably already know this about me, but I do often view the latest fads
and the latest hype with a certain amount of skepticism. I am I going to
get massively flamed in 2 years when "froombla" is released and it's way
better than joombla and we aren't using it? :-) Have any joombla sites
crashed and burned because someone had a weak password and their account was
hacked? Or because there was some security hole in the code? And if a
mysql database gets corrupted or damaged for some reason, how hard is the
repair job?
So anyway for those that are impatient (although I've never seen any
evidence of that around here) you can register and give it a try. I
probably have to give you write access once you register, but registration
is step #1.
Best regards,
Curt.
--
Curtis Olson: http://baron.flightgear.org/~curt/
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