Content and its management

TL;DR -- It seems that it is time to do the periodic review of technology in terms of our use and of choices pending. Nothing urgent is at hand except to increase the ability to have more options as we go forward. In the background is the reserved use of technology that might raise the issues of security, effectiveness, privacy, and other topics. We expect a 'deeper' dive this time (where 'deep' is taken from the AI mania's seeming hold on the imagination of a whole lot of people. What would Thomas think?

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The explosion of techniques over the past decade and one-half is astounding. And, that techniques range from low-level coding and handling of data through all sorts of presentations on various types of platforms (real or virtual) and then the interpretation worlds coming in, especially with analysis as a driver and that the variety of methods are without end is quite a bit to chew on. For the individual as well as for the group. To now, it has been a daunting task to cope; going forward, it will be even more problematic. 

So, doing a relook is quite apropos now. Let's just start with a list, some of which is older than it may appear and have a new face; what is new will be pointed out, eventually. 

Context: Aug 2014, on Decisions; 2021/22 stop to relook; list of Content Management tools and approaches. 

We can think in terms of hats which are difficult to have on at the same time and, definitely, switching modes is no easy task.  

• Project Seven - responsive web design, as they tout, with a huge collection of capabilities which can be plug and play or even more. 
• Dreamweaver - early to the game and still going. 
• CSS-tricks - one of the demonstrators of the ability of this lowly tool that got my attention early on. 
• Joomla - it's open source and capable, but too much on the configuration side of things. 
• concrete5 - again, open source; found it useful but cumbersome. 
• WordPress - very popular; liked it, but, personally, didn't like the ad-hoc collection of fee-based entities seemingly waiting to pounce. 
• Drupal - thematic scheme that was interesting. 
• ...
• Top 10 best website builders - there are lots of these list where some analysis has already been done. 

Must comment about data bases and their issues (several of the above mention their database options).  As an aside, have done this for years. The concern is more general and relates to staying away from conditions that lead to abusive modes being successful. 

One thing that grated was that most of these approaches make heavy use of pieces that are pulled together out of a database. That is, this approach is highly fluid but lacks structure. Is that important? Yes and no. Many of the modern website whose adherence to the chaos (seeming) might dazzle, the performance can stink. Too, it is hard to multi-task in such an environment. If I see something, I don't want it to change while I am cogitating about related issues. Lots to discuss, perhaps. Going with HTML files forced a structure. At first, of course, there were tables, but this usage diminished over time. 

Slow grind

So, we might think of a split where there is structure in the look and its code. Then, data would be handled by a data base, albeit that sort of thing might really require cloud support for reasons of stability. Until now, we have avoided those decisions. So, it's time to go back and reassess. 

We always talked content versus configuration is a recursive manner. One's person content might very well be another's configuration. Better wording might come to fore, but we'll keep with this split for a while. 

Remarks: Modified: 07/23/2021

07/19/2021 -- Finally, we're on the summer tech trek: Techie world, again. No known destination or timeframe for when that unknown is defined sufficiently to consider having arrived there. 

07/23/2021 -- Add TL;DR and image for the portal (https://TGSoc.org).