the Design Experience Weblog Archive

I just read Bake, Don't Fry by Aaron Swartz and it got me thinking. Aaron understandably wants a easy to use way to add information and content to a web site, with little maintenance. A dynamic databse-backed CMS rarely is as easy to setup as a system that generates static pages based on templates.

The only thing I see missing my having easier to use and simpler software on the server is the collaboration tools. I am interested in OpenACS because it is a server-side collaboration toolkit, among other things. The problem is, it regenerates every page, pretty much every time it is called.This is great when you want to aggregate content from different parts of a web site or allow sophisticated web based applications.

The key would be to combine the two approaches, so we could have robust web-friendly static content along with powerful collaboration tools.