manila or radio?

[Peter Harbeson]

Hi,
We're doing something a bit like that with Manila. We have a single 
Manila server that hosts 17 weblogs, each of which is "owned" by a 
different group. All of our weblogs share the same list of users (this 
is simply a setting you choose in Manila), and there are a number of 
people with "editor" rights (this means they can create their own 
stories). Our sites are not internet-accessible, but that's simply a 
matter of configuring your intranet; Manila works either way.

We don't do "archiving" per se, but everything posted remains posted 
permanently. We've found that topical information tends to aggregate 
pretty naturally -- that is, particular topics and discussions seem to 
attract a given community of interest, and a particular discussion will 
focus on related topics. We create "summary" stories when it seems like 
there's a good accumulation of information that we might want to refer 
to again, and use the Site Structure to make the URL to those summaries 
easy to remember (for example, "http://www.mysite.com/xml_basics").

We don't use email updates, but the function is available. You can also 
do something like this with RSS.

Most of the longer pieces we publish come to us as PowerPoint or Word 
files. We store those as Gems, which makes them automatically 
downloadable.

We don't have anything like a to-do list on the site; everybody in the 
company uses Outlook for scheduling and whatnot, and that seems to work 
well enough. We do, however, have a conference scheduling system on the 
site -- that's really the only thing that took much Frontier programming.

The system has had 2.3 million hits in the past year (it's a big 
company), and runs on a Windows 2000 server. It's pretty reliable as 
long as we rebuild the databases weekly.

-Pete Harbeson

On Tuesday, June 25, 2002, at 07:31 PM, Mark Burgess wrote:

> 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
>
>
---
Peter Harbeson
peterh@empire.net