I'm setting up an intranet at work; one that everybody - faculty, staff, students - can use. It will be for news, for messages, discussions, posting and retrieving documents, events, etc. We currently have something in place, but it's just an html subsection of the public site, and is strictly one-way, top-down communication.
So, I've been researching the best cms (content management system) to use to create the intranet. Laura Trippi recommends Plone. She herself currently uses a combination of Zope, Zwiki (short for Zope Wiki) and Blogger Professional. Wiki is difficult to describe, but anyone interested can find the details at http://www.wiki.org/.
Wetcoast is now powered by Moveable Type, which, like Zope and Plone, is General Public Licence software. I used to use Nucleus, but I didn't find it either powerful or versatile enough.
Plone seems quite powerful and versatile. However, there's a bit of a learning curve associated with it, and because it's so powerful and adaptable, a lot of work has to be undertaken at the start to set it up. I'm slowly getting there. It's fun, but exhausting.
It's interesting to be spending so much time on the form, rather than the content. I usually prefer the other way around, but once it's set up, the content will be provided by everybody, not just me. And that's the beauty of it.
Posted by wetcoast at July 29, 2003 01:46 PM