Website Reorganization:CMS Comparison
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[edit] Requirements
[edit] CRM
This is a moderate thing. If there is a CRM module, or a CRM-targetted platform, that exists for a given platform, it's definitely a plus. However, the current CRM solution is tied in heavily with a number of nasty ASP solutions: the old forums, the accounting software, the ordering system, the e-commerce platform, and some others that got lost because X crashed on my chat window. So, migrating away is a definite plus, but is not likely to happen any time soon, and will take significant effort -- like about as much effort as writing our own stuff. JoeBorn has expressed his willingness to consider simply outsourcing the whole mess to a company like Amazon, and also noted that the large volume of Neuros sales are *not* direct orders, minimizing the financial impact that such a solution would have. It ain't broke, thus it's on the back burner. 22:01, 3 Jul 2006 (CDT)
[edit] Communication
The CMS should have a fair degree of integration with all components of communication. It's not critical, but it does help with a unified experience.
I know. "It's not critical? Isn't that, uh, TOTALLY WRONG?" I don't really think so. Although it's important to have easy access to the various forms of communication, of course, the average contributor knows his or her way around a forum, a wiki, and a blog. IRC may not be super-common, but still has fairly decent mindshare. And the almighty hyperlink still works, even in Web 2.0. Doing selective promotion of certain issues should be straight-forward by simply manually linking to the relevant areas and summarizing content. If nothing else, we can hack something together with the now-ubiquitous RSS.
That said, having the option of integrating our various communication systems, which if I am thinking correctly are:
- IRC
- Mailing Lists (the kind where one person sends announcements)
- Mailing Lists (the kind where everybody can talk)
- Forums
- Wiki
- Bugzilla
- SVN
- Blogs
- Official, static pages
- Order tracking and CRM
- Press releases an official time-sensitive news
can be quite attractive. Whether or not the CMS should do all of this is debatable, but is still worth considering. Srobertson 22:01, 3 Jul 2006 (CDT)
[edit] Global Search
This one comes naturally after seeing the above list. Maybe it's just me, but I was startled by the size of it. Having Global Search is both a stopgap solution to hold us over while we aggreate and a long-term solution to ensure a minimum of "user maintainance" -- i.e. shouting on every page "the Wiki is for tips! the Forum is for support! the IRC is for discussion!", and then when it doesn't work chanign it all back. Instead of setting such best practice and being crushingly disappointed by the result, we don't bother to fix it and let it happen automagically.
The big, big question is: is this a separate application, or part of the CMS? I'd vote part of the CMS, as it'd allow us to embed it better, but that's up to the people doing the work on the site to decide. (Don't get me wrong, I want to help, but I doubt I'll be the only opinionated, web-savvy user among the growing community.) Srobertson 22:01, 3 Jul 2006 (CDT)
[edit] User Management
I've ranted earlier on how important having one user ID across the web experience might be, and I still stand by it. From Forums to IRC to blogs to certain users who could be empowered to edit content directly on the site, a single set of credentials (and more importantly a single "face" to the community) is the first step in across-the-board integration. It's also easy-peasy. All of the major platforms support some sort of generic user authentication and whatnot, and most support LDAP, so we can choose that without restricting other choices. Srobertson 00:38, 4 Jul 2006 (CDT)
I'll agree that a single user ID across as much of the web experience is vitally important. We are a community and we get to know each other. This is an important tool in helping us get to know each other and communicate. A central place for background and contact information about folks would seem like a great idea, but do we have any specific ideas as to how it would be done? It seems like all these applications have their own requirements and we already have 25K+ accounts spread around the forums, wiki, drupal, google groups, etc. Stitching them together seems like a big project. I don't know anything about this LDAP server, but it might be realistic to think about it as at least a starting place. If forums, wiki, drupal could share login, that would at least be a great start. Let's see what the actual tools can do and then we can go from a vague notion to the specific. Can we find any other sites that are examples, that have already done this? JoeBorn 11:44, 4 Jul 2006 (CDT)
