Tue 24 Jan 2006
The other day Tom and I were sitting in a meeting where one of our regional leaders was explaining the need to communicate better with our staff members that are scattered around Eastern Europe. In the past we have understood this need and expected to meet it with a website, but website development takes time and money. This project has been on our radar but not at the top of our priorities.
But then it occurred to us that we could accomplish 80% of this goal with blogging software. Blogging software allows anyone to publish a very respectable looking site with no programming experience at all. If you are reading this, you can publish your own blog. Really. Go to Blogger.com or WordPress.com and try it for yourself if you don’t believe me. It’s free, and you can get your own blog running in less than 30 minutes. (I produced squarejer.wordpress.com in less than 5 minutes!)
As we began thinking about throwing up a quick blog template for our area, we thought it just might be possible to get something more robust going instead. Open Source (i.e., free) Content Management Systems have been around for a few years, and we decided we just might be able to get one of these going since they are very similar to WordPress. WordPress is really a Content Management System (CMS) tuned for publishing blogs, and both of us have installed and configured WordPress. We thought we just might have the horsepower to get a CMS going ourselves instead of needing to hire a web programmer to do it for us.
Tom was clearly the person for this job. He can get new things going quickly, and within an hour he had a copy of Joomla running on a new domain he registered at BlueHost.com. By 5:00 today it was nearly ready for the above mentioned leader to start using. The best part of this software is that it allows normal people to publish content through it.
January 25th, 2006 at 1:25 am
Very slick!
January 28th, 2006 at 2:20 am
so is this for website content or just blog content?
January 28th, 2006 at 11:51 am
The purpose of the site is for communication and to make resources available. So if you categorize blogs with communication - and resources with other website content, then this would accomplish both purposes.
January 30th, 2006 at 1:11 am
This looks great! One question though, what about security? Is it safe to have this content posted publicly for all to read and not just staff? I see there is a login, but there seems to be content on the public page (events) that could perhaps be sensitive…. just at thought.
January 30th, 2006 at 9:45 am
jb,
Yes, you are absolutely right. While we didn’t give our initial pass a tight filter, it is our intent to show sensitive content only to those who login to the system. It won’t be self-registration either, so we are hoping this gives us enough security for our needs.
Your impression that our current showing may already be too much is valuable. Thanks for your feedback!