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After much consideration, we've decided that the tutorials/article division of our site more direly needs more significant revamping/updating than our script listing division.

This decision has come because a variety of publishers (who must remain anonymous for now) has offered to republish sample chapters of their perl-related books and offered that their authors provide interviews/articles to contribute to our site (I can only hope they feel good about that). Additionally, we also have individual prestigious authors/developers interested in the same, as well as a few articles that were previously submitted to the Perl Journal (but TPJ had not been responsive perhaps due to the odd administration during the change-over to Sysadmin). Not to mention a few authors of high repute who have written articles specifically for our site already.

Also, Stas Beckman has provided us his complete mod_perl tutorial (before it was published sequentially on perl.com), but we simply didn't have the infrastructure for such an inundation of articles. We still intend to publish the mod-perl series because it will reach a different audience than perl.com does -- We figure that perl.com reaches current users of perl; our site reaches new or borderline users.

Please note that our site has pretty much grown based on our viewership. I'm only one person who had an idea ... the site and its viewership (~1 million page views/month) has grown far larger than the simple idea imagined. Yes, I freely admit that the short-sightedness is causing the problem that I'm in now.

What's driving me nuts is how to organize it all. I simply (and unfortunately) don't have the time to write my own article/content management system. Even more unfortunate, being the President/CEO/Treasurer of two companies, I hardly have time to program at all, except for my days off, which isn't enough to do anything significant... it's barely enough to get the creative juices flowing :(

Banner advertising isn't doing anything, so I'm giving publishers free advertising on perl-related books. I guess if the site no longer generates funds, the least we can do is promote better Perl education.

But I digress...

What we're needing is an article management system that support both "article" and "issue" based publications. We've looked at the following...

Program	Benefits	Downfalls
Any php-based program	Several sounded perfect for the task.	Our users are very biased. We heard many outcries of "why php on a Perl site?!?!?". Please see the reference to our previous dilemma at http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2000/12/advocacy.html by MJD.. We've recently found a great perl-based substitute.
Slash	Logons NewsFees Themes	It seems to work well, but doesn't "behave" from a publishers' standpoint. It would be nice if users can react to an article/tutorial, but we don't want users to initiate articles/tutorials.
Spine	Access Restriction Webbased Administration On-Line Help Styles (Templates) Sitemaps/Navigation bars Macros Built in search engine Logging Articles	Still under development. Sadly lacking in documentation.
Zope	User management Scripting Dynamic content Web based administration Templates and shared elements Object database Support for other databases Support for FTP and WebDAV Support for XML Integrated search engine Large developer community	Flexible, but rather confusing, and it's Python instead of Perl (remember those finicky users?). Root access needed. Yeah, I have root, but I'm smart enough to know that I'm not smart enough to tinker around too much with it until I feel like I deserve that level of access.

The above reflects only the "best" of the hundreds I looked at. If anyone knows something else, I'm eager to see it.

I've seen, and incorporated the suggestions from this thread to no major success. We already have a well-used forum and most of the other "community-based" programs aren't suitable. Of all those offered at that node, Bricolage appeared to be the most suitable, but I hadn't heard of it before.

But I suppose the real meditation of this Meditation is whether or not the Perl community needs another tutorial/article site. Thoughts?

Thanks for any suggestions or insight you may be able to offer,

Jasmine

Update: Added links to the site in question.

edited: Sat Jul 20 14:48:32 2002 by jeffa - added reamore tag

In reply to Recommended Content Management System? by Jazz

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