Bedtime? It’s summer time! Why waste time sleeping…? *yawns*

Welcome JessicaH, you’re on the few members who discover IRC when first joining and I’m really glad you did. I prefer to meet people in realtime than on a forum, it’s just more interesting that way. 😉

I hope to see you become a regular on IRC, it’s often times really fun there, although, yea, it is quite quiet around bed time. 😉

Whilst searching for suitable candidates for some sites I need to run, I’ve come across a few choice picks that I think BigBlueBall might benefit from. Along with these picks, I’ll be including my opinion and critique in relation to how it could benefit BigBlueBall.

First off, let’s start with Drupal. Having worked with it in the past, I can honestly say it is overwhelming. Yes, it can be quite powerful given time and _A LOT_ of effort, but why should we use it when there are better alternatives?

One of the issues I had with Drupal was the lack of user-friendly documentation. I had to spend HOURS just to find out how to do something that you would think would be a feature — move the “Read more…” link from the post’s footer to just after or within the post’s content. Why this isn’t a feature is beyond me. Now if it took me hours to find that out, imagine how much time we would need to waste to solve other issues or queries we may have.

Another issue I had was with the way their resources were organised. It was really difficult just to find something I wanted. Even if I knew exactly what I wanted, it took hours.

However, don’t get me wrong. Once you get Drupal up and running it really is quite powerful.

Now, please remember, I am talking about Drupal. I have no experience whatsoever with vbDrupal.

Drupal is a good choice for the new BigBlueBall, but it requires a lot of work to shape it into a great site.

With that out of the way, I’ve found a few usable alternatives:

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WikyBlog

WikyBlog is different in that it is one of the few CMSs that employ the wiki style of content management. As with wikis, WikyBlog generally comes with ease of use – that is…until you get to its complex AJAX tabular function. Then, in my opinion, all hell breaks loose.

Perhaps it is because I am just not familiar with wikis and how they work or maybe I was just tired when playing around with WikyBlog, but either way I do love the ease of use – being able to easily edit a page and being able to see past revisions, but the overall usage is quite confusing and I must have gotten 3 headaches using it. I really think it was solely due to the confusing interface – silly tabs.

And then there’s the loops you sometimes need to jump through to add content and not to mention the lack of ample security against spam bots etc.

Overall, WikyBlog seems to be new to the game and as such doesn’t have that many extensions or a large community surrounding it – but it does give light to a better way to manage content. I’m starting to really like the wiki style of content management. Having each individual element editable by placing an edit button right on/next to it is ingenious as it eliminates the need to go through a cluttered Administration interface just to hunt down one page you wish to edit.

Could we use it? Of course, but it would require a little editing that I’m sure Jake and Dave can easily do.

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Joomla!

If for whatever reason you liked Drupal, then you’ll surely love Joomla!

Where Drupal brings power, Joomla! brings power, usability, userfriendly-ness and ease of use – right out of the box. Install Joomla! and you’re ready to go, really. The only thing stopping you would be the lack of originality that surrounds your default Joomla! install. But even that takes mere seconds to get rid of – there are tons of Joomla! themes available and making your own is a breeze.

The community surrounding Joomla! is simply amazing and their support teams organize the documentation and resources in a professional, helpful, userfriendly manner. The extensions its community has to offer are endless – much like Drupal’s collection and the many different sources of support available are really helpful.

Although Joomla! does not offer the same level of ease of use as a wiki, its Administration backend is very userfriendly and extremely powerful – not to forget infinitely extendable.

Truly, what I’ve found is Drupal is more for developers and Joomla! is for everyone else and for ease of use.

Could we use it? Definitely. It’s like Drupal but with a lot less work needed to get it “running”.

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SilverStripe

One thing that popped into my head the second I encountered and was exposed to SilverStripe was: “Wow! This is really different!” Because in all honesty, it is. I’ve not seen any other CMS that blew me away with a mere demo or a quick read of their Tour.

One cannot forget that SilverStripe is somewhat “new” (even though it is at Version 2.0 already) and as such lacks extensions (despite being quite extensible) and lacks documentation (although they are doing *really* well with fixing both of these downfalls), however with what documentation they have available – you can clearly see just how powerful SilverStripe really is.

Although the ease of use surely can’t stand up to that of a wiki, SilverStripe is definitely way up there. I could try explaining why this is so..but if you look at the demo, I think you’ll get what I mean much more clearly than if I had to explain it.

The only realy downfall I can see with SilverStripe is the insane requirements it has:

• PHP 5 is REQUIRED (PHP 5.0.4+)
• gd2, mysql, mcrypt, mbstring modules loaded
• MySQL 4.1+
• Apache 1.3+/2.0+/2.2+ with mod_rewrite, and the ability to set rewriting rules in .htaccess files via “Allow Override”.
• Set the maximum memory to at least 32 mb.

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Plone

And then I found Plone. Given that the WOW factor had not worn off with SilverStripe, Plone took me by surprise. I was extremely impressed with it and I think it would be absolutely perfect for BigBlueBall – if its requirements can be met.

Plone has everything. The ease of use a wiki can offer AND the power of SilverStripe and Joomla combined. It truly is no wonder as to why organizations like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Nokia, Early Detection Research Network (EDRN) and a whole lot more choose to use Plone for their websites. Did I mention Plone is endorsed by NASA?

Plone is extremely secure and has been around for over five years. Its development team consists/consisted of close to over a hundred developers all over the world and it is open source.

I could go on all day about Plone, seriously. But what would be the point? I mean you could easily go onto Plone’s site and read all about it. It’s much more well written than I could ever write it. Interested? I suggest you start here.

The only downfall Plone has is the rather odd requirements:

• Zope 2.9.7
• Python 2.4.4
• Archetypes 1.3.2. or higher (comes with Plone nowadays)
• Relations 0.5b1 or higher

Note: I’m not really sure about these requirements except that Zope and Python are required as I don’t have a server that handles this…

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All in all, I highly recommend you read through this “report” and play around with all the demos/watch all the movies etc. for you to get a taste of why these alternatives are more suited for BigBlueBall than Drupal is.

I went to go see it with my girlfriend…I loved it – we loved it. But maybe something else contributed to my love for it 😛 Don’t get me wrong, it *was* good ^_^

Breakout – Use a ball and paddle to smash your way through a series of regenerating blocks.

This game gets boring very fast…

3D superball – I don’t know how the heck anyone could be good at this game, but I know someone will!

This game is easy O.O

Curveball – Outpace your computer opponent in a fast game of Curveball.

My absolute favourite.

Disc Dash – Click the disc’s as fast as you can!

I love this game.

Eskiv – Dodge the moving objects while collecting squares. The more squares you take, the more objects you have to dodge.

This is an addictive game alright!

hmm..this resize thing will make a lot of the games very easy 😀

Indeed. By disabling the generic flash menu, you’ve effectively lessened the probability of having a cheater amongst our community.

It is considerably much more difficult to cheat now.

I’d prefer it if we used that as a weapon to bring them back as premier members + everything else we come up with.