Re: btmbeijing.com
Simon Cousins <simon-MTRkitCQmL6jF/[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.org.user-groups.linux.beijing |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Fellow penguins, (and thanks for the really cool compliment Matteo!) The new btmbeijing.com website was a collaboration between Bjorn and myself. We first started work in about February this year, after I had fought a lengthy battle with The Management to dump the previous piece of crap that I inherited. We chose Exoweb because their Zope and Plone expertise rocks. Also, Bjorn is possibly the most skilled information architect I have had the pleasure of working with. Yes, Matteo, the whole thing is Zope and Plone with ZDB (no, we're not using MySQL for anything except banner ad serving). The site is running on my dual Xeon Red Hat box co-located in Qianlong's Beijing datacenter. It has a gigabyte of RAM. The whole value proposition of the new site is to make it easy to find and navigate the 10 years of writing which the group that I work for has published. Up to this point, we have only populated the database with 2004 content, but I have a team of content slaves coming online within a month to backfill the last 9 years. The channel system is key to the navigation and to the whole site's concept. We say that a good article is a good article, regardless of when it was published. Our channel system has been painstakingly developed over 7 months (seriously - creating a manageable taxonomy for "Beijing" is really quite challenging. Too few channels and you have too much noise in your channels, too many channels and you have a difficult-to-grasp navigational system that scares away users). Other features of the site that we're really happy with include the actual CMS interface itself, which our non-technical editors have taken to after only 2 hours of tuition, the ad serving platform (the open source phpAdsNew), and the neat stylesheets which keep everything orderly (including hanzi). One hidden feature is an amazing back-end script that Bjorn's guys wrote which we refer to internally by a very rude name but what our editorial staff have been told is called "Tidy". It is a single button click which removes *all* of the crappy tags which Word adds to a .doc file. These crappy tags really spazz out a stylesheet, so they must be stripped while still retaining the important markup metainformation. Exoweb's "Tidy" tool took a while to fine-tune (it was like a crack-head with a flamethrower in it's first iteration), but now it is an invaluable part of our group's internal publishing workflow. Folks, Classified ads are FREE. Knock yourself out at http://www.btmbeijing.com/subjects/classifieds and please enjoy the site. Simon. _______________________________________________ blug-general list [email protected] http://list.beijinglug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/blug-general