A Myth Wiki - helpers needed

[vinylrake]

Identity Theft!

seriously no wonder i didn't remember it, that "list" is probably just a SQL dump of all the values in the 'author' field of the maps/plugins table at the time that conversation took place.

ironically, that kind of information won't be so easy to extract in the future as mything.org moves toward a single off-the-shelf content management system, instead of the hodgepodge of wikis, blogs, static pages, and dynamic php-sql code holding the current behemoth together.

[GodzFire]

Excellent! I am looking forward to a single unified site.

How goes the progress?

[vinylrake]

heh. melekor i looked back at that topic the list was from -to confirm, and that list Godz sorted was JUST mapmakers. so maybe just hundreds missing instead of thousands?

godz. progress is moving, but i just have too much information. there's no off-the-shelf CMS i've found that makes managing several thousand
posts/articles/files simple. i thought i finally had nailed the taxonomies i needed to organize everything but the engine is starting to chug once i got 3000+ entries in the db - and i haven't even loaded 1/2 of what's on mything.org - haven't even started putting HD contents up yet.

so i don't know. i was optimistic earlier in the week that i was on the right track, now i am not sure. again.

[WazzaMouse]

heh. melekor i looked back at that topic the list was from -to confirm, and that list Godz sorted was JUST mapmakers. so maybe just hundreds missing instead of thousands?

godz. progress is moving, but i just have too much information. there's no off-the-shelf CMS i've found that makes managing several thousand
posts/articles/files simple. i thought i finally had nailed the taxonomies i needed to organize everything but the engine is starting to chug once i got 3000+ entries in the db - and i haven't even loaded 1/2 of what's on mything.org - haven't even started putting HD contents up yet.

so i don't know. i was optimistic earlier in the week that i was on the right track, now i am not sure. again.

There are still a lot of map authors missing from that list

Anyhow what CMS systems are you looking at and which is crapping out on you. Have you looked at Joomla/Droopal? Wordpress is crap. Or what about writing a simple concise CMS on a framework like CakePHP, Kohana, Code Ignightor ?

[Melekor]

Or what about writing a simple concise CMS on a framework like CakePHP, Kohana, Code Ignightor ?

Boo @ reinventing the wheel. Don't get sucked in VR ;)

[vinylrake]

wazza: i tried most of the cms' you mentioned at some point in the past but i want one that's written in PHP so i don't have to learn another language (rules out at least a couple) if i want to customize something, AND the ones i tried really looked like crap. i LOATHE the 'portal-put-everything-in-a-box' look and it seemed (at least last time i looked) that you really had to jump through hoops to get something that didn't look like it was drawn on graph paper because the underlying structure was PORTAL function-box driven, not category-page-template field-tag driven. as for wordpress? heh, it definitely *used* to be crap, but it's improved a lot. i rejected it for anything other than blog type stuff several times in the past, but they added a slew of features and multiple customizable taxonomies (so you can identify documents as belonging to multiple user-defined categories without having to use 'tags') - which was what kept tripping me up in the past - being able to easily search and display slices of the data in different ways. there's some sweet plugins too that manage and track file downloads, image galleries, etc. So WP has been my self-inflicted weapon of choice this go around. but it may be a moot point as i was 'cleaning' up some stuff last night and was apparently more tired than i realized so Mything.org may be 'gone' for a while.

melekor - i hear you with the reinventing thing. i've got a wiki and a blog or two using off the shelf apps in mything.org, but the guts of it - the maps and articles section(s) are all handcoded php/mysql. honestly though, now that i've figured out HOW to organize the data, i am tempted to write a simple cms from scratch - i could do it pretty cleanly now that i have the data model clear in my head. what prevents me from diving in and just doing this is that i don't want to have to make my own image gallery and file download/tracking software and once i start using outside apps i lose the integration of having everything in one easily searchable place.

[WazzaMouse]

As a note, everything I mentioned is written in PHP I agree WP has come a long way from where it was but it still has issues with handling a large capacity of users at the same time. Not that the Myth community will push it that hard of course.

The framework's that I mentioned are also all PHP based Model/View/Controller. All of them have been around for a while and have their own modules and addons that can be used seamlessly with search and store data manipulation. No doubt there is more coding involved though.

Joomla and Drupal CMS systems(also written in PHP) are pretty powerful and true the out of box experience is very portal looking but with good focus on themeing that can be overcome. Personally I hate themeing though

[vinylrake]

wazza - thanks for the (updated) info, i am taking a look at joomla as of the ones you recommend it seems to come in at the top or in the top tier for everyone in terms of stability, power, ease of modifying, # of mods.

also, theming often drives me CRAZY - but i think part of good site design is giving people visual cues to where they are. and i have such large collections of info that i think it's important to visually identify 'where' one is (what kind of data one is looking at) - whether it's a general article, a map review, a map download page (hypothetically), an application, a mapmaking article, etc. But if i really find an off the shelf that will do what i want, then 'theming' for me MAY be as simple as making the header visually distinctive so one always knows what kind of info one is looking at.

[vinylrake]

fyi on the content management front:

If wordpress is 'cms for kindergardeners' then joomla is "cms for 2nd graders". seriously. this is the LATEST version of joomla just released so recently that a lot of the useful plugins for joomla that add crucial functionality don't even work with it yet and it's bad. just some HUGE holes i can't believe a CMS could miss. OBVIOUSLY it wasn't designed by anyone with even a smidgeon of data analysis/database design background - the most commonly provided "solution" for when someone asks how to assign an article/page/file to more than one "category" is "copy and past the article into the 2nd category". wtf? seriously? if i want to be able to organize my data info cleanly by categories (instead of using the fuzzy and imprecise 'tags') i have to have multiple copies of every article and redundant/duplicate records in the database to (remember to) maintain? i don't think so. very large dissapointment there.

on a more positive note, the latest version of drupal kicks some serious CMS butt. it's a sweet thing to look at under the hood, incredibly cleanly designed as a CMS framework *and* CMS (easy to build onto) and it's not to shabby looking either (completely redesigned admin interface makes it 100x easier to admin - or so i hear). still taking it on a test drive, but it's awfully impressive so far.

[WazzaMouse]

on a more positive note, the latest version of drupal kicks some serious CMS butt. it's a sweet thing to look at under the hood, incredibly cleanly designed as a CMS framework *and* CMS (easy to build onto) and it's not to shabby looking either (completely redesigned admin interface makes it 100x easier to admin - or so i hear). still taking it on a test drive, but it's awfully impressive so far.

Yeah I like Drupal. I've had it installed on my personal server for a while. (like a painter that never paints his house I havent done a "lot" to it.) I am dinking around with a financial management module for it that my wife uses now. Work keeps me busy and the chat program I am building in my off time. Drupal has a lot to offer not just for developers but it has some nice ease of access features as well. Like direct page editing without having to login to the backend. That's one of my favorite features because I am lazy at updating it