Why this site leans on PHP, Python, SSI, …
(oh - how do you like my new look by the way? I decided that serifed fonts don’t work on the web after all. Not if you are only “gifted” with my design qualities).
One of the things I set out to do a couple of years ago was to integrate the mish-mash of techniques used on my site into A Single Framework™. In 1999/2000, I was enthousiastic about Zope (that enthousiasm quickly subsided when I tried to do some complex stuff with it), later on the plan was to do everything in a Smalltalk appserver. It would be useful, because at the moment I’m having to keep the style for this site synchronised in four places.
So, I made a shopping list: a weblog system, a wiki system, a bit of content management, a photo gallery. Maybe one or two simple apps. How hard can that be? After all, in Squeak we have the world’s most powerful web framework!
As usual, the devil turned out to be in the details. My Wikis got abused by linkspammers–Swiki doesn’t have spam protection, MoinMoin does. When reading up about blogging, with all the stuff around tracebacks and pingbacks and–again–spam protection, I realized that SmallBlog was a bit lacking in this area as well. And so it went on…
I realized that I had a choice to make: for some higher idealistic goals go with tools in a single environment, or simply pick best-of-breed tools, whatever language they’re in, and integrate them.
You may not agree with my choice of MoinMoin, WordPress, phpBB2, Gallery and SSI as “best-of-breed”, but the issue is clear: if you insist on a monocultural environment for a site, you will be limiting yourself.
That holds for Smalltalk, for Java, for Zope, for Ruby, even for PHP. At the end of the day, a website–whether yours or a customer’s–needs to employ the best tools and modules available. Your job as a Web2.0 programmer is to glue them together so the user never sees the difference.
One-trick ponies are going to get a hard time in this world…
Stumble it!
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December 20th, 2005 at 1:21 am
The problem with the multiple system is intergration. Gallery is not integrated at all in this site, and use totally different design. MoinMoin is intergated quite nice but need more work with the sidebar and backgrounds colors in RecentChanges. It would be nice if you use the same design you use on the blog for the sidebar, and replace the bluish backgrounds with warmer backgrounds, like the background of the “This entry…” box in the botom of the blog entries.
December 20th, 2005 at 1:53 am
You’re right, Nir. Well, actually not completely - integration doesn’t really qualify as a problem, it’s just work that needs to be done
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Anyway, to your issues: I am evaluating which sidebar I like better. So I’ll probably keep both of them around for a while, tinkering mostly with the Wiki sidebar, and see whether I can take the concept (which is currently just a MoinMoin default) to a level where it might apply to the weblog.
As for the gallery site, I decided to give it a different look. Photos need their own presentation, and the colored backgrounds of my main site’s design does not work well for pictures (I tried). I might do a bit more “branding” on the site, it’s something I am still thinking about. Certainly I want the look of the main site to be stable before going there.