PubForge Blog

Today Matthew, TC, and I had a nice phone conversation as part of the PubForge coordinating group.  In the absence of Bill and Dale, the agenda was a bit unfocused, but that lead us down some interested paths.

For one thing, we decided PubForge could be useful for publishing notes on a wide variety of topics, including software and tools we’re using or evaluating for possible use, and just stuff that might be cool, interesting, or whatever.  With that in mind, in no particular order, her are some notes on today’s call:

1) TC says she is being asked to develop some Flash animations for her site, apparently in the form of an animated logo.  We feel her pain, and hope her people will listen to PubForge when we say “don’t do it!” Flash can be great for certain things, but animated logos are no longer cool. We could also talk about accessibility here.

Cool things can certainly be done with Flash as an interface to content, for example I mentioned this page from The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/01/15/us/politics/20090115_HOPE.html?hp.

2) A discussion of CRM software occured, in which the name Convio figured prominently.  Jack said his view of Convio is favorable but limited.  Matthew said integrating it with Allegiance is problematic.  We all said this could be a useful discussion to have with more people, to find some good experiences and best practices.

3) TC mentioned a couple of webmasterly things that look really interesting:

• An open source CMS called Concrete5 (http://www.concrete5.org/) she is working with.  We didn’t discuss lots of details about it, but on the surface it looks easy to use, and follows the MVC (model view controller) approach like Drupal.
• A cool-looking CSS framework called Bluetrip (http://bluetrip.org/), enabling simple and valid multicolumn layouts, including support for the dreaded IE.

4) Jack mentioned an online video tool called Tubemogul (http://www.tubemogul.com/index.php) which allows you to upload a video to many of the top websites (including Google Video, MetaCafe, MySpace, AOL, Yahoo!, Revver, YouTube, etc) in one fell swoop.  It also gives you analytics.  I haven’t explored it yet, but PBS has adopted it for publishing its online video.  That either makes it cool or not-cool, I can’t keep track…

5) Finally, let me mention that I accepted the task of organizing a CMS Roundtable session at the IMA Conference next month. Which means I have to find panelists to talk about various CMSs.  So I’m looking for panelists with experience using Drupal, Plone, Joomla, and Rails.  Would also consider expanding the lineup to include other systems and frameworks, especially open source ones.  I invited TC to come talk about Concrete5, and I hope it gets her to the conference!

I think we might end up with a formal CMS Roundtable session, and another informal CMS discussion, because one session isn’t enough to cover the topic.  The information CMS session will likely also include beer.

If I forgot something, I hope the other participants in today’s PubForge call will follow up.

Yours,

Jack