Re: [Phpwebsite-developers] One among many

[D C. <can...@ui...>]

Is the point of this post just to ask what ideas should be on the todo
list for phpWS, or is this implying that there is some interest in
trying to make phpBB work more closely with phpWS?  I would certainly be
in favor of seeing phpWS and phpBB become closely-knitted projects.  But
perhaps I read too much into this posting?

Anyway, a couple of comments below...

On Fri, 2001-11-30 at 08:19, Matthew McNaney wrote:
> For those unaware phpBB is working on a CMS front end for their BB system.

> News
> 
> Ability to add pictures to news posts, resize them etc. 
> Ability to set the order news appears on the site
> ------> I would like to see this as well

Haven't looked at the very latest releases of phpWS, and I'm not sure
what the most generic/flexible way of doing this is, but I'd like to see
it be possible to replace the standard topic icons with pictures, and
then also be able to have attachments (pictures, WP documents, whatever)
for each news article.  The former would make our media relations
department happy and the latter would reduce disk-usage problems caused
by our university-wide mailing lists.


> Calendar
> private and public events
> 
> -------> This is either built in or planned. I will not work on calendar
> however until the core is finished.

Calendaring is of course the big deal a lot of places.  I think it would
be great if we could somehow make HORDE applications (IMP & Kronolith in
particular) with phpWS since they already have such a good head start in
calendaring and mail.  For example, I think it would be great if the
"mail to a friend" option could just pop open an IMP compose window that
was pre-populated with the article that you were forwarding. 

I think the main thing that people are seeing with all the different
attempts at "groupware" are that no one open-source group can do
everything and do it well.  Unfortunately, the best of breed
applications have wildly different foundations.  If we could find a way
to make a few of the major ones talk to each other (sharing
authentication sessions if nothing else), we'd be making a huge amount
of progress.  And that diversity can still be a positive because if
there's something I want to write, I can choose to make it a phpWS
plug-in, a HORDE application, or whatever else makes sense.  

I hate to ask a question that will generate too much traffic on this
list, but maybe it would be worth discussing what _other_ web
applications people are using that would benefit from being able to
interact with phpWS.  That might give us an idea if there are any
projects that should be seriously considered for joint development.
 
While commenting on features, we have one functionality concern that
we're looking at in choosing a CMS...  The first is that we have a need
to have a lot of sub-sites.  For example, we have our university-wide
web site, and then we have the departmental sites that want to have
their own content.  It would be ideal if there was a way (with themes,
or some kind of sharing between phpWS installs) to allow a user to post
an article on the business school "portal" and have it optionally appear
on the university-wide portal page.  We have a need for similar
functionality in an event calendar (to display Business School events
vs. university-wide events).

With all that in mind, I do want to say that although development
doesn't appear to be moving as quickly in phpWS as some other CMS'es, I
still am a strong fan because it seems that this is one of the few
projects that is really working to build infrastructure into the system,
rather than just sheer quantities of features.

Sorry to be so long-winded.  A happy weekend to all.

DC