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Doug <dougsweetser at gmail.com> wrote: > I've got a web site, and it needs a gallery for pictures of animated > quaternions. It would be good to have some blogs to go along with > these, to explain what these images might mean. It would be good if > people could rant (politely). Coincidentally, a friend of mine got me into a Drupal project just this weekend. He had me set up a get-out-the-vote database for one of the prop 2-1/2 override initiatives this spring. (His only reason for choosing Drupal was because of this particular add-on, something called CiviCRM.) So now I've got experience with three of the CMS tools: Mambo, TWiki, and CiviCRM. I ran into TWiki at a BBLISA meeting this winter, and used it to build a personal website for managing a games-night group, and then launching a blog of my recent vacation. My opinions on these, limited as my experience has been: - My experience with Mambo was a while ago. It was too cumbersome to post content and I quickly gave up on it, though it was integrated nicely with a photo gallery called Coppermine. - TWiki has been surprisingly useful because *anyone* can simply hit the edit button and fix the page directly. (Drupal is like this too.) It doesn't take two steps to update a page, it's really instant. And there are a wide variety of add-ons to make it do what I wanted. One of the neat things for novice users is that it accepts simplified special characters to render rich-text; example, you can type *bold* instead of <b>bold</b>, or you can [[http://foo.com][include a link]] instead of <a href=> blah blah. I also like how it stores and display file revisions (using rcs, a tool that I've always used). But the blogger addon for TWiki sucks. It wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't somehow botched the installation but even so, it's something I wouldn't wish on my friends. - Drupal was the easiest for me to get running out of the box. It does require MySQL - TWiki doesn't. If it has the ability to track file revisions, it's something you have to activate--I haven't tried to set that up. I've found that, at least with the CiviCRM addon enabled (not sure if that matters), this software has a disconcerting tendency to add/drop whole sections of left-bar / right-bar / top-bar navigational content depending on what page you click on in the administrative sections. So I find myself lost a lot of the time; that shouldn't be a problem for an end user navigating a site you design with it. Both Drupal and TWiki have pretty fine-granularity access permissions that you can attach to pages. The model for TWiki is based on ACLs (access control lists) that you can define on a systemwide, group or topic (page) basis, and you can define them to do whatever you want; Drupal requires you to set up a set of rules using a grid layout within the administrative section. TWiki's method is more powerful but its user interface needs pulldowns instead of your having to manually type in all the ACL info. -rich -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.
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