On Sun, 29 Apr 2001, Gunther Birznieks wrote:
> At 09:14 AM 4/28/01 +0100, Matt Sergeant wrote:
> >On Sat, 28 Apr 2001, Gunther Birznieks wrote:
> >
> > > As I think I mentioned, it's great that the people like you on this list
> > > have a passion for delivering cool software.
> > >
> >[snipped]
> > >
> > > People rarely look at toolkits like payment gateways and messaging servers
> > > unless there is an application that fits their needs that they can use
> > > which happens to use these backend components.
> >
> >Actually there's an exception to this rule. Look at Zope.
>
> But Zope has an application? -- content management. A template engine is
> not an application, but a content management tool built upon templates
> surely is?
>
> I thought you would recognize this as you are building something to allow
> this on AxKit?
I don't disagree with you, I just think it's a very fine line. Content
management is a kind of meta-application, because like the core mod_perl -
you still use it to build other applications. It just happens to have a
bit of a friendlier interface to it. And that's what it's really all
about - friendly interfaces.
Case in point. AxKit wasn't an immediate success (in mod_perl scale
terms) because it's a cool project, or because I spammed the list over and
over about it. It was an immediate success only after I changed the web
site from a drab and dreary look to the new design (even though everyone
hates the purple!). I know most developers find that hard to fathom, and
it still irks me a bit, but that's the reality of it.
> Of course, I guess you could consider AxKit an application because
> presumably it comes with scripts to allow aggregration of news content in
> RSS format? I consider this a really nice application.
>
> But it's also a bit difficult to tell that this is what AxKit does. You
> might consider separating AxKit the engine from AxKit the applications to
> allow people to find your site looking for applications (eg news, content
> management) so that they want to use AxKit. And then when they want to use
> AxKit, they will want to use mod_perl.
Thats the intention, and the RSS NewsMaker module (the news content
management system that Take23 uses) is separate, but I haven't really had
time to make it easy to use and install yet, typically. Interestingly
though there is very little interest in it, which is strange, but then I
don't have a link to it from anywhere.
--
<Matt/>
/|| ** Founder and CTO ** ** http://axkit.com/ **
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// || ** http://axkit.org ** ** XSLT, XPathScript, XSP **
// \\| // ** mod_perl news and resources: http://take23.org **
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