So while I’m waiting for my Gentoo kernel to compile, rather than drinking bourbon and folding paper (or browsing illicit web pages) let’s have a rant - after all, isn’t that what blogs are about?
I work for a fairly large ‘digital communications agency’ (new media in old-skool lingo) and we’re fortunate to have some fairly substantial budgets to work with, but that doesn’t mean life is easy.
My job, near the top of the food chain but in a technical capacity, is often to decide on a technical approach for particular projects. I hate re-inventing the wheel, and I’m lazy at heart, so if someone’s developed something that will do a job I’m more than happy to use or adapt it. (why do you think one of my categories is ‘tinkering’)
Today however, blessed with the fact that most of the Account Managers were out schmoozing clients and watching cricket test match, I spent most of the day perusing what’s available on the Open Source market for content management / blogs / community sites for a project with a ‘challenging’ budget.
My biggest challenge was figuring out what a particular package did, how it would make life easier, and what I’d have to do to demonstrate it to the decision makers. I had a fresh look at Joomla and Wordpress which I’d played with before, and finally got round to finding out what Drupal and some of the wikis (MediaWiki in particular) offer.
The alternative is either to start from scratch with a bespoke application (possible, but have we the budget) or extend our own set of CMS tools that we’ve been developing in recent times.
Joomla! I know quite well because I use it to drive the Happisburgh Village Website and Wordpress was considered to power this blog (still don’t know if I made the right call, but I do like this one so I’m sure I didn’t make the wrong one)
More later - I think I’m just getting warmed up…
