Lonely Lion

CMS, short for Content Management System, is a big fat buzzword of late. A CMS is any software that allows for (semi) non-technical types to add content to (semi) technically intensive publications. In short, it allows lay-folks to add HTML content to a webpage without knowing HTML.

This site runs CMS software called, Moveable Type. Moveable Type (herein: MT), is pretty slick software. It’s entirely Perl based. MT is great for Weblogs, but not very good at more in-depth sites.

Post Nuke is a “Slash-a-like” CMS written in PHP. “Slash-a-like” refers to Post Nuke’s similarity to Slash-Dot, a popular “News for Nerds” site.

I recently installed Post Nuke on portal.lonelylion.com. The intent is not to replace this site, but to supplement it. Lonely Lion will continue to be a MT-powered site. Portal will be the populist arm of this enterprise, allowing anyone to add content.

Now that the politics have been addressed, let’s look at the features. Post Nuke, for all it’s bells and whistles is a group weblog. The main page’s center column are news articles submitted by users of the site. These will mostly be short paragraphs, pointing to interesting content out there in the world.

For now, only registered users can submit these articles. Once submitted, the article is reviewed by an Admin (currently only me), and then published. This three part cycle: submit >> review >> publish runs most of the features of the site. As much as I’d like to have a free-for-all type site, it just doesn’t work. For that kind of freedom, check out The Lonely Lion Wiki.

In addition to news articles, users can write reviews, create links to other sites, and suggest downloads.

If you’re interested in a general overview of other Weblog software packages, check out this article on Webmonkey, here.

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