In Wednesday's article The weblog as the model for a new type of virtual learning environment? I considered some of the affordances and constraints of the weblog as the basis of a new type of learning environment. We're exploring potential candidate toolkits for developing such an environment and, for my sins, I volunteered to look at an open-source content management system called PostNuke which seems to be finding support from the uber geek community. My 'look see' is still work-in-progress so I've not reached any conclusion yet but here's progress so far. The first challenge was to locate some decent introductory documentation on PostNuke. The PostNuke website must be one of the most new-user hostile I've come across in a long time; in the end it was our friendly Google that led me to the appropriate idiot's guide. With this documentation in hand downloading and installation wasn't difficult.
First impressions of PostNuke were good. It didn't take long to get a default web site up and running and it was easy to see how it's modular architecture suits the open source development model.
My target was to build a rough version of Auricle in PostNuke and all appeared to be going well until it came to the equivalent of the Auricle RSS Dispenser. Now readers of my earlier articles on this subject will know that I consider the syndication service offered by RSS to have significant, and as yet underexploited, educational potential. Adding the equivalent of an Auricle RSS feed was easy in PostNuke but unfortunately the PostNuke developers appear to be taking a strict approach to how their system will interpret RSS data and so PostNuke didn't expect to find html markup in the RSS data. In a previous correspondence with Stephen Downes on this topic the conclusion was reached that whilst the RSS specification may not allow for markup the reality was that most modern RSS readers coped admirably with it and many sites were syndicating their RSS with such markup. So I've contacted the PostNuke community and it will be interesting to read their response. As they say 'I'll keep you posted'.
