PubForge Blog

Jeffrey Zeldman, publisher and editor-in-chief of A List Apart, spoke to several interesting web development issues in a new video posted on Big Think. Though not as smart or celebrated as Zeldman, I’ve been thinking similar things: we’re at a point where open source tools, and open sharing of core ideas and code, enable any one of us to build great standards-compliant websites.

I was a bit floored at about 3:30 into this video when Zeldman reveals that A List Apart is moving from a Ruby on Rails CMS to ExpressionEngine.  As PubForge people may well know, I’m a big fan of EE and have been using it to build all my websites for the past two years.  Some in the open source community regard EE as a compromise in principles or something, because it’s produced, sold, and maintained by a company so its not technically open source.  My feeling has always been that EE is based on open source technologies (Apache, MySQL, and PHP), has an open API, and a huge community of developers working collaboratively around it.  The company that produced EE, EllisLab, supports it fanatically and continues to improve the product. And it only costs $99 for nonprofits (plus potentially additional dollars for certain add-ons).  EE isn’t open source in the same way Red Hat Linux isn’t.

I just want to say without offending anyone that while the whole world seems to be drinking the Drupal coolade, I think there are other legitimate CMS choices.  It seems to me the bottom line is adhering to web standards, good information architecture, sustainability of URIs, and the ability to interoperate with other systems.  That might be a good place to start for building a truly smart online public media system, no matter what CMS is involved.