[thelist] Idea: Distributed CMS.

David.Cantrell at Gunter.AF.mil David.Cantrell at Gunter.AF.mil
Wed Feb 26 08:40:01 CST 2003


> Firstly, it is  important to note this I do not see a central
> database with mini websites. In this system each site is its
> own master - a peer to peer network in effect. This enables
> each individual site to keep control in there hands. For
> instance, if a roleplaying club joins a national group of
> roleplayers and later on disagrees with them on some
> fundamental idea, they can if they choose simply leave the
> group and still own all there own content, domain name and website.

James,

Having just read your requirements, and having not used this product at all
(but wanting to in the near future), it sounds like your requirement could
at least partially be met by using the MoveableType[0] weblog at each
installation, having multiple contributers per weblog, and then using
MoveableType's TrackBack[1] capability.

A quote from the TrackBack docs: "Using TrackBack, the other weblogger can
automatically send a ping to your weblog, indicating that he has written an
entry referencing your original post."

The neat thing is, from what I've seen you can ping categories on remote
sites, and this could work the way you are wanting. I see a site like
LazyWeb[2] set up for universities, with hundreds of categories set up, and
each category pingable from remote weblogs. Whenever someone posts to a
roleplayer weblog at one university, they ping the Role Playing category at
the central server, and other university sites interested in that can then
pull down the RSS feed for that category.

The important thing to remember is, with pings, you are only passing around
notification of content, not the actual content. So the RSS feeds generated
by this central machine would only contain pointers to the original
resources on the individual university servers.

This is massively scalable and known to work, because hundreds of thousands
of weblogs are doing this every day.

And as far as not wanting to have a central server, remember that DayPop[3]
and LazyWeb are central servers, and they work very well. They have their
growth problems, but hey, who wouldn't with a service like that?

HTH,
-dave

[0] http://www.moveabletype.org
[1] http://www.moveabletype.org/docs/mtmanual_trackback.html
[2] http://www.lazyweb.org/
[3] http://www.daypop.com



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