Tom Hoffman, who is doing some really cool things with open source CMS type programs up in Providence, has a far better understanding of all this technology than I do. He’s demonstrating COREBlog which is a Web log interface for Zope, which I don’t have any clue about. He may be right when he says “Regular weblog tools aren’t designed for the kind of enterprise integration and complex roles needed for large scale deployments in schools” (though I hope he’s wrong about Frontier…at least in the short term.) But it’s eventually all going to come down to the same issues: ease of use, ease of installation, tech support, time, etc. At least open source is reasonably priced, but as I’ve said before, I know there’s not going to be a lot of support for it here for quite a while simply because it’s too unknown and there is safety in what you know. I wish I had a developer like Tom at my school, but…
UPDATE: Read Dan Mitchell’s response.
Hi Will,
As far as I can tell, Frontier is probably the best choice for school weblogs in 2003, and maybe the next couple years. If that makes you feel any better. 🙂 It just doesn’t look like Userland has the personnel or technology to be able to keep up.
–Tom