General Rambling

Oops -

Sorry for posting my last mail to the YahooGroups list. I replied to the 
wrong message....

I just felt like a bit of a whinge.....

My colleague and I have installed Wyona but failed to get it working 
satisfactorily. I think we got stuck without a username and password to let 
us in. And yes we did try the one mentioned on the mailing list, and yes I 
know how to generate an encrypted password with the java code supplied by 
following the instructions

There should be a working demo before we can even consider using this 
software. We should be able to read some sort of documentation before 
having to install the software.

At the moment I am wondering whether it is worth carrying on with Wyona or 
deleting it from my hard disk and looking for something else.



I run several not-for-profit sites including project Galactic Guide 
http://www.galactic-guide.com inspired by the Hitchhikers Guide to the 
Galaxy, http://DiverseBooks.com  a book reviews website, and a few others. 
The problem has always been management of new articles, the workflow whilst 
they are still in draft, and incorporating them into the website - ie 
content management. (I obviously want to know what solutions I can use for 
paying customers too of course).

I have used perl programs written to provide specialist content management 
systems such as Slashcode. This is only useful for short term news articles 
and only has one type of article workflow.

Although I have done a lot of C++ and perl web development in the past I'm 
steering towards more Java and XML based systems such as Cocoon. (I was 
using SGML and full text databases six years ago) I'm not terribly 
impressed with XIndice&Cocoon's performance and will be sticking to Turbine 
for most web applications where I can - rather than do *everything* in XML. 
However for things like the book reviews site XML is absolutely the way to 
go for most of the system.

Now what I would like is enough understanding of what Wyona can do to 
understand how I might build a system with it. At the moment I understand 
nothing - I know what Cocoon can do but almost nothing about Wyona.

I don't know whether it works with an XML database, I don't know whether it 
can cache lists of things such as review titles, authors, topics, and so on,

I don't know how it will work if I don't purchase XOpus.

I don't see that installing the latest CVS version is the way to learn all 
these things.

Is the developers mailing list a lot more active than the users one? Will 
that help?

Alex










Openweb Analysts Ltd, London: Software For Complex Websites 
http://www.OWAL.co.uk/
Free Consultancy for London Companies thinking of Open Source Software.