On Tue, Mar 15, 2005 at 04:54:14PM +0000, Jonathan Leighton wrote:
PS. Bryce, out of interest (+ I might be able to do something about it too), what is it you don't like about WordPress, or prefer about the current system?
I think mainly my reluctance stems from past problems with other content management systems. WordPress looks like a great tool, and it looks like it's got some people excited about using it, and that's good. It's nice that it has RSS.
There's a number of issues I've seen when converting to a CMS in the past. Some of these were specific to the particlar CMS's we used at the time, others are probably more inherent issues with CMS in general.
Traditionally, the CMS's are always touted as "making it easier for non-techies to add content to the site, so more people will work on it". This is out of a feeling that web applications are easier to use than commandline tools, and that "everyone" is comfortable using web tools but not everyone is comfortable using commandline tools. Unfortunately, oftentimes CMS's end up just as complex; the more features the CMS has, the more complex. As well, it often turns out that there are people who prefer doing things through commandline over web tools, who end up ceasing contributing to the site. Thus, in the end, the _number_ of contributors doesn't change, just their identity.
One cost of most CMS's is that they're more computationally intensive. Oftentimes they're implemented as "dynamic pages", meaning that things get generated on the fly. There are some advantages to this, but also some disadvantages. For example, the two times I've gone through conversion to Zope, performance was dismissed as an issue to consider, yet once the system was implemented, it would break whenever we got Slashdotted. One ends up implementing Squid proxies, etc. in order to overcome this. With static pages sitting in a file system with nothing but Apache (and maybe PHP) needed, the number of things that can go wrong is much smaller, and performance is essentially a non-issue.
CMS can also be somewhat inflexible in certain ways, compared with plain file system based approaches. For instance, if you need to make a global modification to a site, if everything's in a plain file system it's pretty straightforward to write a sed or perl script to make the change. With a CMS, you're limited to the tools that come bundled with it; often you could create an add on or hack into the CMS code itself, but it can turn out less time consuming to just make all the changes manually.
Maintenance can also be an issue. In the current system our news is implemented in nothing more than two php files (the front page plus a second page for archived news items). With a CMS, in order to "simplify" things, it often requires adding a database, some libraries, templates, extra code, config files, etc. and from an administration point of view you've actually complicated things a good deal. Is the extra administrative complexity worth the user simplicity? In a big company, perhaps, but in a modestly sized OSS project like ours, the person using the system may end up being one and the same as the guy mainaining it.
Education is another area of concern. In a company with marketing people who don't know CVS, education may come out favoring the CMS since they're more WYSIWYG. However, in an open source project, the random contributor is more likely to have had familiarity with CVS and/or PHP than with a given CMS. A random contribution is more likely to come in as a raw HTML or PHP page.
Finally, change always seems simpler before you've started doing it. In each case where a CMS was employed, it seemed like a straightforward thing to implement. As with anything, the devil's in the details. By the time you're done, the impact could net more problems than benefits.
Now, I wouldn't say all of the above would happen with WordPress. I've never used it for anything non-trivial, and besides, the present proposal is to use it only for managing the news.
I also wouldn't say the present system is without flaws, or that it couldn't be improved on. I'd love to not have to log into the website in order to deploy a change. It'd be sweet if the news items could also get generated into an RSS feed. But it works, I understand it, and it doesn't require much administration.
Would adopting WordPress make it easier for some users to post news? Well, almost certainly. Would those people actually post news? Given that they're not posting news now with the current system, this doesn't seem to be quite so clear.
I think people tend to mis-estimate the "work" involved in adding news items to a website. Looking at most websites you notice that the news items are short blurbs, maybe with a few links. Seems simple. One would assume most of the effort is taken up by operating the levers to get the item into the site. The first time you post news, that's probably true - you have to learn what script to run, what file to edit, etc. But after you've done it a few times, the mechanics are trivial. You can rely on finger muscle memory to do it.
The real work is in actually _writing_ the news item. First, you have to notice that something is newsworthy. For most people, they simply aren't thinking about that; they probably just jot a note to the mailing list and leave it at that. Second you have to understand it. Often our news items are highly technical (i.e., involve new features with new jargon). Next comes the writing. If you're really lucky, you can cut and paste the item, but most of the time you have to rewrite it; it could be too long, or written in first person, or assume knowledge from the reader that may not be there. Then some other formatting work (adding links, imgs, etc.) Writing two or three news items can easily take up half an hour. Committing the change and pulling it up on the website is the easy part, and only takes a minute or so.
Thus, if I had to guess, I'd bet that changing the technology for managing the news will not necessarily result in more news getting posted (at least, not over the long term). I definitely could be wrong, though, which is why I had been keeping my opinions to myself. Sometimes technology actually does have a big impact - wiki is a good example. So despite my skepticism I'm keeping an open mind. I definitely don't want to be the stubborn old man sitting in the way of progress! (8^[=~
Anyway, that's the long dissertaion explanation of where my mind is. Basically, if WordPress will ensure we get more people frequently contributing news, then that's good thing, but otherwise, I'm comfortable with the current system and happy to continue playing journalist. If we go forward with WordPress, and it enables people to take over doing news directly, then great, I can devote that time to coding instead. ;-)
Bryce