I started creating a satirical take on a society’s website I belong to (and have lots of friends in), in between revising Human Computer Interaction and Thermal Physics (gotta have some fun guys ;)). As I want myself and other people to be able to post news easily to the front page and add images to it (eg photos and videos of committee members doing stupid things), my first thought was “WordPress”:http://www.wordpress.org/.
Then I thought it would be nice if people could create new pages on the site - let those with talent start spoofing pages off the current site. Plus, feeling lazy I liked the thought of creating links in the page template and then browsing to them and sticking in the content - instead of getting out my “FTP client”:http://www.smartftp.com, uploading the files and hoping the design template could be shared between WordPress and static pages.
That seemed to lend itself more to a wiki rather than a weblog. But then the wiki wouldn’t have such a streamlined way to post news (which is needed if most of the members’ have a chance of using the site).
I’ve had a very quick look around for software to do this (while trying to memorize Helmholtz free energy and the Grand Partition Function) but without installing it I couldn’t tell if it would do what I want.
What have you found useful for projects like this? Someone, somewhere, must have encountered this problem before and written a program to do the job.
7 comments ↓
I _think_ coWiki: http://www.develnet.org/ (needs PHP5) does something like this. It at least seems to allow you to have a little more structure than a normal wiki - see http://www.phpcommunity.org for an example.
Thanks Harry, but I’m stuck with PHP4 still on this server.
Time I started doing some reading/playing with PHP5…
Another for the road - http://wiremine.org/AboutCardboard - seems the keyword is “bliki”
There’s no reason you can’t just use two different products, is there? I don’t know much about the space, but I don’t see why you can’t have a blog on one page, which has a link on the nav that points to the place where a Wiki starts.
Rad idea, btw.
bq. Rad idea, btw.
Ideas are one of my favourite things - I just seem to come up with ways to improve things naturally.
It drives my family/colleagues/friends crazy
I’ve done another survey and it still appears to be a radical idea. I will dedicate a proper blog entry to this, but let’s just consider the following:
For whatever system you use the web is just a series of views on the data.
Thus it makes sense to have a time-based progression *but* not just when content is created - when content is revised it gets entered as a ‘Page updated’ into the timelike blog view. In other words the blog view becomes a “Latest changes” system along with topical entries not worth their own space
All entries are versioned as is usual in a wiki, so you can see the update history (so old blog entries make sense). However, on old blog posts it will be highlighted that the page has been revised, so please see the latest…
And crucially, unlike a wiki you will be able to implement a proper navigation system. No more lose pages everywhere with no structure - a proper hierarchical structure of documents can be created (ontology, taxonomy, whatever - I’m still learning the terms!)
I think you may consider the CMS Drupal whose navigation system is based on taxonomies.
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