Hi all, recently someone requested me to implement something on http://www.linux.org.il/ and after I was distracted and explained the fact that it is a custom PHP site that parses XML at run-time and converts it to HTML, and that there is no apparent need why it should be a dynamic site, he said he thinks he'll just install WordPress there and allow people to edit the site.
I think it's a bad idea. As opposed to WordPress and similar CMSes, static XHTML sites that are generated from templates have the following advantages: 1. They are more secure. WordPress had a very bad track record of security vulnerabilities in the past, and other PHP (see http://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/anti/php/ ) and MySQL (see http://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/anti/mysql/ )-based content management systems are usually prone to other problems like that. Please don't focus exclusively on this point. 2. They are much more reliable than a dynamic site. A static XHTML site is generated from templates which is maintained in a version control system (nowadays it can be a distributed one, where every copy has the entire history), and can be built and reuploaded at any time. The PHP and MySQL CMSes tend to get offline (often permanently - see the links I gave) due to many problems, and then restoring them is incredibly painful. Some MediaWiki site that are now offline are: * http://perl.net.au/ * http://wiki.perl.org.il/ * http://wiki.osdc.org.il/ * http://www.iglu.org.il/wiki/ 3. They can be made more structured than a CMS that just gives you a big HTML editing textarea, where you often have to duplicate markup, or in the case of MediaWiki, something much more vile and unstructured. 4. They are faster to load and consume less resources than a server-side-scripted CMS. -------------------- Naturally, dynamic CMSes have some advantages such as the ability to add user-generated content, and they might be more friendly to laymen, but this is not relevant to http://www.linux.org.il/ which is a static portal. If you're looking for a solution that combines some of the best of both worlds look at ikiwiki : http://ikiwiki.info/ ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikiwiki . This is a wiki engine that stores its pages as files in a distributed version control system. Regards, Shlomi Fish -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ What does "Zionism" mean? - http://shlom.in/def-zionism No one calls Xena the warrior princess “Zeena” to her face and survives. Luckily for you, she hasn’t visited the modern day United States yet. Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply . _______________________________________________ Discussions mailing list Discussions@hamakor.org.il http://hamakor.org.il/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discussions
