I was gratified to see such a response to last week's article; obviously there's a chord been struck somewhere. As I indicated last week we are evaluating a few open-source content management systems and my particular focus at the moment is PostNuke. So if you want an update read on! I was a bit disappointed with the lack of configurability in the current RSS engine used in PostNuke and I was concerned that the forthcoming update was still going to take a 'strict' approach and not allow the option of, for example, hyperlinks in the RSS descriptions (a la Auricle's RSS Dispenser).
Over the weekend I researched some of the alternative PHP-based RSS parsers that are out there and found, with relative ease, what appears to be a really good alternative. A constraint for us is that we tend to be PHP oriented and so favour systems which make experimentation a bit easier for us. PostNuke is PHP-based and so I was interested in how easily we could extend its functionality. The answer seems to be 'fairly easily'. As a result I now have built a functioning equivalent of the Auricle RSS Dispenser in PostNuke. It has got a few rough edges but that's just a question of finding the time to sort them out. Also, there appears to be lots of third-party modules for PostNuke out there, so that's a healthy sign.
One of the reasons we are looking at systems which claim to be 'Content Management Systems or Frameworks', e.g. PostNuke, Drupal, Zope, instead of just weblog engines, e.g. pMachine, is that the former should be able offer weblog functionality, be easily extended and, above all, not ignore user and group management. Many pure weblog engines appear to be built around the concept of an individual author, whereas we want that only as one option, with probably the default state being multiple authors with authorship rights being granted to groups of users. Easy integration potential with MIS/LDAP would be pretty essential to.
Having said all of the above many weblog engine developers seem to be in the process of transforming themselves into developers of 'web publishing systems' , e.g. MoveableType, pMachine's ExpressionEngine. Maybe we are going to be spoilt for choice but I suspect it's going to be the extendability and user/group mangement which are going to be the key discriminators.
