Thu Feb 6 20:38:26 PST 2003

I’ve been looking into a number of blogger, groupware, Content Managment Systems packages for possible use both at home and potentially for use on the church’s website. I recently purchased a copy of ORA’s Slash book and have read about a quarter of it to try and get a feel for how Slash works and how it can be extended and such.

The one thing that really impressed me was that the developers have a very clear and complete understanding of both their workflow and dataflow. The tools (which they have gone through several revs of) then implement and support those flows in a very clean and clear manner. It’s a great example of software engineering where the problem was well understood, and then the solution was implemented to support that problem, making common activities simple and quick, and uncommon activities are proportionally more difficult.

Unfortunately, for my needs, I’m really like the ‘look and feel’ of the blogger solutions like Moveable Type. But in reality, the key to solving the problem is clearly defining the workflow and that dataflow. And I’m fairly certain that a ‘blog’ or ‘story’ metaphore is not the correct solution for all of the church’s data, although the slash workflow and framework still retains a lot of appeal. Slash is extendable, but at some substantial cost because that’s not a common activity :-)