Archive for the ‘Open Source’ Category
Apr
02
2010
at 1:49pm
Back in September I wrote about an agreement by the University of Waterloo to use the Open Text Web Content Management system. Well, as it turns out, that decision was “revisited” in February and UW will be using Drupal as it’s official web content management system.
I have been on maternity leave since October so I’m not entirely sure of the reasons for this decision. I know that some people went for training on the Open Text system in November and found it to be very cumbersome and difficult to use (something I thought was evident from the beginning, to be honest!). I think there were some other issues as well but I don’t know too much.
Needless to say, I am thrilled! There is a tiny bit more information on the Kitchener Waterloo Drupal User’s Group, as well as in the UW Daily Bulletin.
Posted in Drupal, Open Source | No Comments »
Sep
08
2009
at 8:04pm
Well, actually, we didn’t really “choose” anything. Something was chosen for us in the form of a “donation” from OpenText of their web content management products to the university. I co-chaired the committee that was charged with investigating content management systems in the fall and winter 2008/2009. This “donation” was arranged completely outside of our committee. In fact, we didn’t even know it was happening until the deal was essentially done.
I did do my best to sell the benefits of Drupal to the committee, and to explain why the OpenText product (formerly called RedDot) was not a good solution (phrasing it politely). However, I’m not sure that, given the chance, “we” would have chosen Drupal anyway. Why? Here’s a few of the biggest objections given by others in the group:
- Sever models – the other two systems under consideration used a “push” model where static pages would be published to outlying web servers. This was considered to be preferable to a centralized model where pages are served by a database. Why? Mainly because many units within the university really want to run their own web servers. They also liked that the main system was “behind the firewall” and therefore more secure. This issue was focused on by some people to the exclusion of any other factors (usability? functionality? extensibility? who cares?). A few people actually said that since these two systems used the same publishing model then they were “really the same”.
- “It’s not enterprise” - I’m not sure what this is actually supposed to mean but it was a big problem for some people (and I’ve heard this in other higher ed circles as well). Maybe if it had a sticker price of half a million dollars and obscenely complicated server requirements, then it would be “enterprise”??
- Security – there are still many people out there who believe that open source must be insecure because it’s developed by “some guy in his basement.”
There might have been other issues, had we ever gotten around to actually testing Drupal against the other two systems. Drupal isn’t exactly known for its usability, but from what I saw from the others Drupal isn’t any worse and might actually be better. To be honest, our presentation from Acquia didn’t do a lot to make the benefits of Drupal more clear.
Posted in Drupal, Open Source | 5 Comments »
Aug
29
2008
at 1:08pm
When I started my new job in October the computer that I had to use was a Power Mac G5. This wasn’t my choosing – the guy before me really liked macs and had the whole office switch over several years ago. I was allowed to get a new laptop as well, and chose a Lenovo Thinkpad T61 and installed Ubuntu.
Until now the Mac has been my primary machine – home of email, web browsing, scheduling, and my main design activities. Why? Because that’s the way I set it up at first, before my laptop arrived. I used the laptop mainly for harder development activities, and file transfers (more on that later).
This week I finally decided to move to the Ubuntu machine for my primary activities. Why? Because I just don’t like OSX that much. It hinders my activities in some pretty significant ways.
Why I’m leaving Mac
Crap file management.The Finder doesn’t work for me. No location bar and no tree strucure side panel makes it difficult to navigate folders and move files around the way I want to.- Insufficient panels & customization. In Ubuntu I can have as many panels I want, can put all kinds of stuff on them, and can arrange them however I want. In OSX You just have the dock, and you can really only put applications or files on them, and you can’t even put in a separator to keep them organized.
- Various other annoyances. Such as:
- program menus are glued to the top of the screen on one monitor only, which detaches them from the window. This is especailly annoying when the program you’re using is on the second monitor.
- the date/time doesn’t open to a navigable calendar. I often use this to check dates in the past or future.
- you can’t see hidden files unless you run a command from the terminal to turn them on. Thus, hidden files are either always on or always off.
Why I’m keeping Mac
I’ll keep the Mac around for some tasks (I have a KVM switch set up so I can easily toggle between the two), including:
Those pesky .docx files. Correction: Open Office is now able to open .docx format. This must be new because when I tried last week it didn’t work.- Dreamweaver – until we get a CMS in place I still need to manage sites built with DW templates.
- Photoshop – because sometimes the Gimp isn’t enough.
Update 02/09: My apologies for the tone of this post. I didn’t mean for it to be inflamatory in any way. I actually had made some edits that were accidentally lost (how, I don’t know!). Sorry about that!
Update 03/09: Comments on this post are now moderated.
Posted in Open Source | 68 Comments »
May
11
2008
at 11:13am
The much celebrated WordPress 2.5 upgrade was released about a month and a half ago and I’ve finally gotten around to upgrading my installation. I was really looking forward to the new Happy Cog designed admin interface. But guess what? I was disappointed.
The new design is surely nicer looking than the old (although I didn’t really have a problem with the old design). They’ve made quite a few interface changes – some good, some not so good. Read on to see some screenshots and analysis of the new interface.
Read more…
Posted in Design, Open Source, Software, Usability | 10 Comments »
Jan
13
2008
at 12:50pm
Finally, after many months of planning we’ve converted The Webmaster Forums from vBulletin to Drupal! Liam wrote a good explaination of why we made this choice in his article, Goodbye vBulletin, Part 1: Reasons to Switch. In short, we felt that vBulletin was too cluttered, too difficult to work with, and was hurting our search rankings.
We chose Drupal partly because our content site was already built on it so it’s a good opportunity for integration. We also have the programming expertise to make it work just the way we want to. With vBulletin we were often making do and putting in work-arounds to accomplish certain tasks. We also considered Vanilla and punBB – both open source, standards compliant, modular forum platforms.
The move didn’t go entirely smoothly. We decided to do it at Christmas time because we knew traffic would drop andway and if there were going to be problems, this would be the best time to sort them out. The biggest problem turned out to be the module that was generating the Google sitemaps, which brought the sever down a number of times before Liam figured out how to fix it. Unfortunately, our server admins are in the UK and weren’t availble to respond as quickly as we needed them to.
As with any change, we are experiencing a temporary drop in search rankings and visitor traffic. Members will awhile to get used to the new format, and surely some will choose not to come back. It will take some time to build the community back up again but in the end we feel the change will be well worth it.
If you’re not a member already, I hope you’ll stop by the forums and join us. We work hard to keep up a friendly, knowledgeable, spam free community.
(This actually happened just before Christmas but I wasn’t able to post because I’ve been sick for 2 weeks 
Expect a short flurry of posts as I catch up on things I’ve been thinking about).
Comments are now closed on this post. I was getting a lot of spam on it for some reason. If you would like to discuss this further, please visit the Webmaster Forums discussion on this topic.
Posted in General, Open Source | 4 Comments »
Nov
23
2007
at 12:09pm
Up until just over a year ago I had really only ever used Windows. I’d encountered Mac in passing but hadn’t actually used it. Why? Pure ambivalence. I didn’t feel the need to try other operating systems. And let’s face it, OSX isn’t exactly easy to acquire for the average PC user. Buy a new computer just to try a diffent OS? Not happening. I had a vague awareness of Linux but I assumed it was just for super-geeks.
Was I ever missing out! I’ve ben using OSX for over a month now at my new job. Although I wouldn’t say I’m enamored with it I do appreciate many differences from Windows. Liam (my husband) encouraged me to swtich to linux at home (when I had my old computer last year) and I haven’t looked back. Just this week I installed Ubuntu on a new laptop at work (and put Windows in virtualization) without much trouble at all. Any problems are always a quick Ubuntu Forums search away. I’ve always been big on customization so Linux is a great choice for me.
As an avid computer user and web professional it’s been a great experience to have a better understanding of how other operating systems work. Can you imagine only ever using Inernet Explorer? Of course not! So why are you satistfied with the default operating system that came with your computer?
I’m finding that OSX + Ubuntu is a great combination for web design. OSX for graphics, multimedia, and Dreamweaver. Ubunutu for file management and development tasks (one of the reasons why I wanted a Linux laptop is because I find the file manager in OSX to be really limiting). Of course, it helps that right now my Mac is hooked up to the nice big monitors 
That may change…
Come think of it, the lack of diversity in operating systems is really kind of sad. I don’t mean that alternatives aren’t available — they are. But the general computer using masses have very little awareness of them. Can you imagine if everyone drove the same kind of car? Or bought the same kind of DVD player? With almost any product used by regular people you can think of a wealth of alternatives. Consumers have choice. With operating systems, they don’t take advantage of the choices available. But you can’t really blame the average consumer, because the choice really isn’t available. Ever try to purchase a PC with no operating system or even an operating system other than windows? Generally not available (unless you know where to look and even then it’s difficult).
Posted in Open Source, Software | 7 Comments »
