Over on my other blog last night I wrote a piece about how building simple web sites has never been easier. I talked about how it’s really simple to use something like WordPress or Drupal to build a web site that will suit the needs of many organisations – charities, schools, organisations like that.
You’ll have noticed that both Drupal and WordPress are written in PHP. If I was going to include another item on the list, it would probably be Joomla – which is also written in PHP. The first Perl-based system on my list would be Movable Type (or perhaps Melody, the community-driven fork of MT).
I use MT to build blogs (this site is built with MT). I also used it to build my company web site. So why isn’t in my top three suggestions? Well for two reasons. Firstly I don’t think that it’s quite as easy to use for non-technical people as the other systems on my list. And secondly, last year I tried to use MT to build something more complex than a single-blog site and it all went horribly wrong. With some help from the people at Six Apart those problems are getting sorted out and hopefully the project will be launched soon, but I’m currently wary of recommending MT to end users wanting to build sites.
Of course MT gets better all the time. The MT5 betas look really nice and I’m really hopeful that Melody will be a great end-user CMS. But currently I’d still recommend Drupal and/or WordPress.
End users don’t care at all what technologies their web sites are built in. As long as the site looks good and works well, why should it matter to them whether the site is written in PHP, Perl or anything else? But from the point of view of language advocacy, I’d like to be able to recommend something that’s written in Perl.
So what can we do? Well, firstly, you can tell me if I’m missing anything. Is there some other Perl-based simple web site builder that has completely passed me by? What systems would you recommend (or use yourselves) if, for example, a local school asked for help building a simple site?
And if there isn’t something that I’ve missed? Should a group of us sign up for the Melody project in order to ensure that it becomes a worthy alternative to Drupal? Is there some other project that we can co-opt to this purpose?
Or do we just not care? Is it ok that we’re in danger of losing the low-end web CMS market to PHP systems?
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