Battle of the CMSs

So far, we've looked at several CMSs to create our online collections. This week, I am comparing most of them-- Drupal, DSpace, EPrints, the PKP Harvester, and Omeka. The comparison is from the point of view of a person using my websites. My comparison is based purely on what I can do with them. In other words, I have seen very cool things done with EPrints, but I can't do them. My EPrints website is horrible looking. In the real world, the same criteria would apply. If I'm deciding on a CMS, and I know I can do ABC but not XYZ, it doesn't matter much if other people can do XYZ. I can't, and my website will reflect that.

I think it will be easy to ferret out my preference.

How do I feel ambivalent about thee?

Oh, Drupal. I hardly knew ye. Really. I just don't get you.

That's because I'd have to spend months with you just to understand how to even talk to you. And then months after that for things to really work between us. And I just don't have the time, Drupal. Not now, anyway.

You're a confusing piece of work, Drupal. I managed to download a few modules, and even a theme. But did it work? No.Well, yes and no. I found the modules, I configured them, but they just sit there, stupidly, not knowing that I want them to do something. And you didn't tell them to do anything, did you, Drupal? Because I didn't know how to tell you to tell them. So my plans of allowing "Top Terms" to show users the most popular terms used on the site went up in smoke. So did the thesaurus I thought I was building with the module "Similar by Terms." They would have been useful, I think. Especially if my collection were bigger. But, it was not meant to be.

And the theme. We could have had a grand time with CleanFolio, with its professional-looking colors of green, cocoa and brown. But you ruined that, too, didn't you, Drupal?

I'm sorry.I shouldn't lash out. It was just as much your fault as mine. I don't really understand you, not like I should. Can you provide interactivity to users? Can users group and collect items into their own, personal gallery? Can you be that flexible, Drupal? If you can, maybe we can get back together some day. But for now,

see ya.

The great and powerful

So I got a taste this week of the POWER OF THE SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR. It's fun adding users who can't use my system until I'm done adding them... and I will be done when I'm good and ready! And only giving users permissions I want them to have. They will have to be nice to me. Ha ha ha ha ha.

Don't make me release the flying monkeys!

I actually had a small bump in the road on my way to becoming the System Overlord, receiving a message akin to this as I tried to install the libdm5-perl component:

Heh, Heh. Oops. It seems I had some trouble unhashing hash marks in last week's unit. Oh, well, not to worry, I just went back and redid all of unit 2's configuring and the second time I attempted to install the libdm5-perl component, I basically got this message:

So, all was right with the universe again, and I went about creating and destroying lives as I saw fit as the SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR!!

Ahem, if you would, please do not tell anyone that while system administrators are great and powerful, like Oz, they are in reality merely men (or women) behind the curtain. In reality, all I was actually doing was following instructions on a little piece of paper (virtual, of course) and adding pretend users to my pretend system. If I were actually in Oz, I might have expressed my week this way:

Oh, you liquidated her, eh? Very resourceful!

I need brains to be a systems administrator. Duh. But in this week's learning, I was once again reminded about using your brains to work through a problem. When I wasn't given permission to download the perl component, I knew I hadn't done something correctly last week. In discussion boards, classmates had said something about doing Unit 3 over. I went back and looked at the assignments-- sure enough, I saw some things about getting permissions. I went back to my first snapshot and started all over again: it worked. And, I was also reminded once again, much like saving your work as you go, take snapshots. It only takes once to learn the lesson. Usually.

I should have felt it in my heart.

I need a heart to be a systems administrator. Or, rather, ethics. Which, luckily, I have. Systems administrators have Super Powers. Powers most people don't even know about. You know that paranoid feeling you get when you rip on a co-worker in a company email? Hang on to it. Systems administrators can read your email. And anything else on your system, except your password, and big whoop on that because they can always reset it, anyway. Systems administrators can determine who can do what on the computer. I suggest you bring them candy and flowers on a regular basis.

You are talking to a man who has laughed in the face of death, sneered at doom and chuckled at catastrophe.

And you need courage. At first, you need courage in abundance. I'm the kind of computer person who feels just enough courage to try things but doesn't have enough brains to pull them off each time. But hey, that's what snapshots are for, right? So as I'm reading about the commands we've used  I'm also fiddling around with commands to see what works and what doesn't. I know from experience that fiddling around with computers is really the only way to understand them. Many of us are self-taught, and we do pretty well, because we learn the tricks as we go. Sometimes the hard way. Right now I think most of us are feeling pretty courageous just using the command line. So, we're getting there!

So while systems administrators are all-powerful, ultimately they are just people behind the curtain who can be revealed by little Scottie dogs and the FTC. And unless they have brains, a heart, and courage, they really won't be very good at their job.

But, please don't tell anyone that because I like them all to be afraid of me. VERY AFRAID! HA HA HA HA HA.


I accept chocolate any day of the week. Goodbye, folks!