I can certainly see the attractions of WordPress, though found it uninviting, even more uninviting than developing the small site using Dreamwobbler and templates (an unforgiving route, and Nested Templates are, for anyone sane, a big no-no!, but it was successful and it is robust).

I looked at Drupal. Prior experiences with it with sites I run using show me that it has attractions, is fairly straightforward to design in, but seems to run out of steam. The site I use it for today is http://finance-mentor.com and, while the site is robust, Drupal doesn't always work as one expects. A lot of time can be spent trying to remember how the heck one did things!

Joomla and I do not get on. I dislike the user interface. Again the http://dartmouthmuseum.org site s a small site, so I can educate the content author in using DW instead of a user interface that she already loathes with Joomla.

I half considered MediaWiki to create a locked down solution. It's a pretty good CMS. It has extensions that allow for events, for example. I run several sites in MediaWiki, but my very technical friend who has to update it periodically loathes it and feels that the developers should all be shot, sequentially, and at dawn, noon, and dusk just to teach them to put decent source code together! And it needs a technical demigod to install successfully.

My technical friend and I have dabbled with a "half CMS, half HTML approach". This approach requires knowledge of basic HTML (not a bad thing) and also knowledge of how the site structure works. It has a menu structure scheme with an expanding and contracting menu which we would have designed differently today, and the user upload mechanism is FTP in the raw. For a small museum that would work, but it requires certain processes to be performed without fault.

The issue I see for a project to provide an Open Source solution is the incentive to do it. Nothing is truly free. There has to be an incentive with chargeable surround services for a developer to cut a single line of code, even though the surround services are optional. Unless, of course, you are The WIkimedia Foundation, when lord knows what your commercial motivation is! But their code is poor in the extreme.

On 17 Aug 2011, at 09:14, Bonewell, Perry wrote:

> There's some great suggestions here. I might also add that sometimes you
> might have an IT dept. that do not allow you to have direct access to
> your own data and a dynamic connection via the web is impossible due to
> stringent firewall policies!
>
> At which point I'd like to ask people what they think about the
> following:
>
> To a certain extent Tim describes a few features below that remind me of
> WordPress (and one or two people have mentioned the attractions of
> WordPress too).
>
> The advice I am getting for an "off the peg" solution is to go with
> Drupal. I can't really go into the whys and wherefores here but for many
> reasons WordPress is a very attractive option to me right now (I
> appreciate that there are many here that will try and dissuade me).
>
> I might be able to get some funding to develop a WordPress plugin and a
> collections search seems to be the function that is lacking in WP. I
> would want any plugin to be open and free for anyone else to develop and
> reuse.
>
> Even so the idea of developing tools and plugins that can be reused and
> developed by the museum community (and utilise existing systems that
> have a broad user base and well established developer community) is
> attractive to me.
>
> Does anyone think there would be any mileage in this approach?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
> Tim Trent
> Sent: 16 August 2011 22:31
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: What would an open source museum CMS look like?
>
> [Preamble]
> I'm coming late to this discussion. I'm new to this list, too. I'm not
> competent to discuss anything other than a web site Content Management
> System. My competence comes from running a few web sites and discovering
> that no Open Source Web CMS has met my needs so far. I have no expertise
> in Collections Management Systems.
>
> I've just worked under the request of the trustees of the Dartmouth
> Museum Association as a pro bono volunteer to put its site together at
> http://dartmouthmuseum.org - a site that is imperfect under the skin,
> and yet meets the small museum's needs. I can tell you that what I've
> achieved for a small museum's amateur webmaster would be untenable for a
> large museum.
>
> And yet the other options were closed to me, primarily because of lack
> of anything other than a minimal and well guarded budget, for the DMA is
> a charity and must husband its resources carefully. I should tell you
> that I speak here as an individual volunteer. I can not speak for the
> DMA itself.
> [/Preamble]
>
> A museum web CMS must be both Open Source, and capable of deployment by
> an amateur webmaster on the meanest and smallest of hosted server
> packages. No specialist knowledge, nor specialist access to the server
> must be required. One must assume that the web server is a welded shut
> box that can only handle simple file uploads to create the site.
> Interface with Collections Management Systems must be possible with
> ease. Limited selections of the Collections (up to and including 100%)
> must be easy to interface with the web system Design templates for web
> pages must be easily available at no cost, easily edited and W3C
> compliant (don't do that check at http://dartmouthmuseum.org because I
> chose an imperfect(!) template) Authors who are used to M$ Word or Open
> Office must be able to copy and paste text without falling foul of
> character encoding issues (smart quotes, ampersands, < and > signs,
> diacritics, ellipses, etc). We expect our authors to have skill in
> creating text, not in meeting the needs of the internet gods.
> Embedded picture resizing must be optimised for web delivery, and not
> restrained by peculiar shapes. Do not get me started on peculiar shapes
> for images and CMS mis-designs that constrain webmasters to them :)
> Security issues which allow hacker access to the server are simply
> unacceptable. No discussion.
> It must be easy to add any adverts one wishes to publish, not just form
> Big G, but form any provider of advertising revenue Widgets for things
> like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ Google Analytics and other similar items
> must be the work of moments to install. Faffing about with putting code
> into HTML pages is insanity and requires knowledge Control over the
> 'rel="nofollow" attribute for links must be available on a link by link
> basis Support, that bane of any Open Source project, must be available,
> and not using arcane services like Bugzilla or OTRS. And it must be
> delivered so that my mother can understand it (though she died in 2007).
>
> I know I can get past 10. IT just seems rude, since I'm late to the
> party
>
> Tim Trent - Consultant
> Tel: +44 (0)7710 126618
> personal blog: timtrent.blogspot.com/ - news, views, and opinions
> personal website: Tim's Personal Website - more than anyone needs to
> know
>
>
>
>
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Tim Trent - Consultant
Tel: +44 (0)7710 126618
personal blog: timtrent.blogspot.com/ - news, views, and opinions
personal website: Tim's Personal Website - more than anyone needs to know




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