manila or radio?

[Mark Burgess]

Hi --

I am thinking of a project and don't know if Manila or Radio would be 
better suited for it (hopefully it won't need both). I am a little 
bit familiar with both but not enough to know what-all the 
capabilities are. I used Frontier quite a bit in the Aretha days but 
have not looked at it much since it went commercial. I downloaded the 
Radio 8 demo and tried it for a couple of hours but then let it lapse 
since I did not have a need for it at the time.

We are setting up a handful of working groups (maybe five groups of 
four) within the company and I'd like each one to have a weblog to 
foster discussion and information-sharing. Here's what I think we 
need:

* Private. The weblogs should be private, preferably running on our 
own server. They should be Internet-accessible but password-protected.

* Shared. Several people will need to be able to post to each weblog, 
from a variety of machines (i.e. one person should be able to post 
from work, home, whatever... preferably they would not need a local 
application to do this).

* Super-easy. Most people posting are not technical.

* Archive-by-topic. Although archiving by date might be ok, I am 
thinking that a memepool-style topical archive will be more valuable 
in the long run. The ability to assign multiple topics to one item 
would probably be necessary.

* Access to newsfeeds. It would be nice to be able to instantly grab 
news items and add them to the weblogs. I started to play with this 
in Radio but got a little bit lost -- iirc it seemed to only be able 
to show news items that had been posted in the last hour, but instead 
I would need to select from everything since the last check (probably 
once every day or two). I also had trouble finding a master list of 
all available news feeds.

* Discussions. Each item should be discussable.

* E-mail updates. Group members should be updated whenever the weblog 
page is updated.

* Long articles. At some point people will want to be able to write 
longer articles that have their own page (and automatically link to 
these from the home page of course).

* Task management? I can imagine that if folks really like using this 
tool they will want some kind of integrated to-do list related to the 
weblog/website. What I have in mind is a list of tasks for each 
person, which would show up on the page if that person is logged in. 
Maybe some unassigned tasks that everyone in the working group would 
see.


Thanks,

-- 
Mark