It's one of those serendipitous things: I'm trying to figure out some interesting things to do with RSS feeds (more on that later). In my search for software to do what I want, I ran across an app called Drupal that seems to be able to do what I want to - and a whole lot more. Basically, Drupal is a platform on which to build an online community. It lets you build forums, user journals, calendars, news items, etc. And equally important, it lets tie everything together under a common infrastructure and taxonomy. Every page is, by default, an entry point into a discussion. Every "node" (basically, a collection of related items in its database) dynamically generates an RSS feed. It has tools to let you integrate common information flows into discussions, news feeds, almost anything - and you can even build collaborative workspaces.
As I sat there the other night playing with it (yes, I'm hopeless - especially since I was doing it over Wi-Fi while riding my exercise bike), I realized Fusion could use a serious dose of something like this. One of my goals for this year is to develop "community" on Fusion. The most important part of that is offering you reasons to come back - and we have some interesting forums coming up that I hope will do that. But underneath it all, we need a common platform to create a sort of "Metcalfe's Law," i.e, make it possible for all the nodes in this "network" to interact - and to begin forming themselves into useful resources for participants (who knows enterprise networking better than you folks? Imagine a collaboratively written networking encyclopedia, as one example).
Right now, we have Weblogs, we have forums, we even have a way for folks to comment on and rank resource links. But they're all completely disassociated from one another. Weblog readers miss out on relevant forum discussions - and vice versa. We make it hard to find new definitions we've posted. I'm sure you could find plenty more that's wrong with the setup we have today.
Drupal may not be the platform we ultimately settle on (When I looked at its templates, I quickly realized why every Drupal site I've seen looks pretty much like every other - instead of being HTML with PHP tags thrown in, they're basically PHP with some HTML tags thrown in, and since none of us here has done any PHP scripting, that's a big hurdle), but it shows the way I'd like us to head.
Comments? Am I on the right track, or am I missing something?
Back to CompendiumIt definitely sounds like a neat idea. I've heard of Drupal, but haven't really looked at it much. Maybe this will give me an excuse to play some.
And PHP isn't that bad to learn. I've become quite good at it. It just requires a little practice. :)
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