In the spring of 2003, I began looking for a replacement for PostNuke for both Kairosnews and for use in my teaching. After some unresolved disputes among key PostNuke community members, the community had forked with a few developers remaining with PostNuke and the main core developers leaving to found Xaraya. Project development subsequently stalled on PostNuke, while Xaraya focused on a major, long term rebuilding, much as Netscape did after Communicator 4.6. It would seem that neither project could guarantee the long term stability and growth that I was looking for.
Plus, I had chosen PostNuke for Kairosnews with a newbie's understanding of CMS's. With a year's experience, it was time to look for a new platform based upon the following three main criteria:
- The development community and the direction of application development. Open source CMS's have to be evaluated more than merely on their functionality. The processes of development, characteristics of the community and its interaction, and the development focus are important for understanding where the project will be in the future.
- Weblogs. Open source CMS's typically offer some community blog functionality through a news or article module for creating a Slashdot-style community site. However, given the then just discovered potential of weblogs as a pedagogical tool, I was looking for an application that provided expanded weblog capabilities as well as all the other features that a CMS could offer. I must admit that I am drawn to open source CMS's as general site building tools because they have so many uses other than just for the classroom, and learning one content management tool is much easier than learning two, three, or many. With strong weblog functionality, I could also use the CMS as my personal weblog and for other education-related website projects.
- Functionality in specific contexts and ease of installation, configuration, and use. Among open source CMS's, all have different characteristics, making some better suitable for particular contexts than others. Most writing teachers would find using any of the following a refreshing alternative to previous experiences with Blackboard or WebCT:
- Mambo has a reputation for being an excellent, easy to use web-publishing medium for pushing content to the web such as an online publication.
- Tikiwiki is a "community portal" application developed by wiki enthusiasts and thus a great application for those that prefer wikis first and foremost.
- Drupal development has always focused on community, collaboration, and social software features.
- Plone, which runs on Zope, an application server with a powerful content management framework, has more content management emphasis in its development and is very popular among distance educators because of its implementation of Dublin Core Metadata and SCORM compliance.
- Elgg, the "open source learning landscape platform" with an emphasis on social network design features common to Facebook and MySpace.
In addition to these and other open source CMS's, I also examined open source learning management systems (LMS) such as Moodle and Caroline. At the time of my review, none of them had the blogging features I was looking for (Moodle now has a weblog module under development). More importantly, these applications are limited in their role as alternatives to proprietary LMS's. They will always be virtual class spaces first and foremost. Consequently, their development is influenced by their need to mimic the main proprietary LMS's in the market. The modular design of open source CMS's, on the other hand, would allow them to evolve to both include common LMS features and put them at the cutting edge of social software development.