[clue-admin] [Fwd: changing website]

[Dennis J Perkins]

This should have gone to everyone on the admin list, not just to
Crawford.




There doesn't seem to be enough interest among the members to decide
which way to go.  They should be asked again before a decision is made.

As to whether we should choose a wiki or a blog, I think it depends on
what we want to do.  A wiki is good for organizing lots of information.
A blog is better for someone posting his thoughts and getting comments.
I think a wiki might be better for our needs, but maybe someones sees
how to use a blog for a group.

Mediawiki would work.  A Chicago Linux group uses it.  One speaker
copied our website for his presentation.  Mediawiki offers multiple
passwords and password levels.  It's not hard to use; just learn a very
simple markup language.  It might be more than we need, but we can
simply ignore what we don't need.  A few individuals voiced opposition
to PHP, which is what Mediawiki is written in.  However, most wiki and
blog software seems to be written in PHP.  Instiki is written in Ruby,
but it only has two password levels:  a superuser password for Instiki,
and one password for each wiki (Instiki calls them webs).

If we use a blog, we could either use a hosting site or host it
ourselves.

Writing our own program is out of the question.  It could be fun but I
doubt we could maintain the interest to pull it off and it would be
custom.  I'm learning Ruby On Rails and it can be used to build a wiki
(Instiki is a Rails app), and the underlying database structure for a
wiki isn't complicated, but that final 20% is usually where 80% of the
work is involved.

Re presentations, if someone wants to provide files that people can
download, I think either a wiki or a blog can be configured to allow
that.  Or maybe some presentations could become part of a wiki?

Either a wiki or a blog will require a database.  MySQL is the most
common.  PHP is also needed; maybe we need a PHP module for Apache?  Or
does it run standalone in this case?  I'm guessing our provider would
let us do this but maybe I'm wrong.  The database and config files need
to be backed up.  If the database gets large, would backups become a
problem?



Jed has mentioned requirements.  He said they are in the admin mailing
list.  I don't know exactly where they are.