[ACT-R-users] Overhauling the ACT-R website

Wed Feb 15 12:00:47 EST 2012

Here's my experience.

Wordpress is the simplest and easiest to use. If the functionality of 
the website is going to remain the same and all you need is an update to 
the look and feel, there are a whole of paid themes for Wordpress from ~ 
$39 to $150 that will make a world of difference. Some examples...
http://www.elegantthemes.com/gallery/
http://www.woothemes.com/themes/
http://themeforest.net/category/wordpress

Joomla - is a more full-featured Content Management System. Joomla is 
great if you do not want to modify or tweak the standard code. The 
automatically generated code is horrendous to read (at least it used to be).

Drupal - Like Joomla is a full-featured CMS. It is open-source to boot. 
It is great if you want to tweak or modify the code since it make much 
more sense that Joomla code. On the other hand, as others have pointed 
out, there are some problems.

As for suggestions for improvements...
1. I know message boards are so 1999, but it seems like there would be 
enough interest in the community to have a message board rather than a 
mailing list. It is straightforward to set up a phpbb board.
2. A way for people to submit their publications to the site. This 
functionality would probably take Wordpress out of the running. 
Drupal/Joomla can handle it, as well as some of the others that have 
been mentioned.

--unm

On 2/15/12 11:40 AM, Dario Salvucci wrote:
> You might have to choose your poison based on what functionality you need. Drupal is used for our department's web site, and they loved it at first, but a lot of problems came up later; my impression of drupal is that it's powerful, but sometimes too powerful, and it's easy to get lost in the complexity.
>
> Ultimately it may come down to what exactly is needed that the current web site doesn't fulfill. For example:
>
> * If you want only a more modern look and feel, this issue is largely orthogonal to the technology; the design would have to be spec'ed out no matter what the back-end content system might be.
>
> * If you just need to post occasional entries/updates, wordpress might work. But I'm guessing that it'd be a challenge to get wordpress to do even what the current web site does, never mind more than this, so wordpress seems like a less desirable option.
>
> * If you'd like a user name space where people can log in and submit new papers, etc., then something like drupal might provide this service and you'd have to live with its drawbacks.
>
> I'm not really familiar with Magnolia and Joomla but these seem analogous to drupal, and maybe are easier to deal with?
>
> Dario
>
>
> On Feb 15, 2012, at 9:12 AM, Bonnie E John wrote:
>
>> We use drupal for the CogTool website and it has been nothing but a headache - I can go into details, but won't here unless somebody asks me to. As further evidence against drupal, just last week, Terry Winograd was speaking at the HCI Seminar and the HCI Institute's web page, which also uses drupal, showed the talk being in two different locations depending on where you looked on the HCII page -- drupal had a bug that updated the information in one place and didn't in another!
>> Bonnie
>>
>> <graycol.gif>Stephane Gamard ---02/14/2012 05:54:50 PM---Hi all,  I was about to queue the multiple advantages of wordpress until I read Wayne's reply ;). To
>>
>> From:	Stephane Gamard<stephane at gamard.net>
>> To:	"Gray, Wayne"<grayw at rpi.edu>
>> Cc:	john<ja0s at andrew.cmu.edu>, "<ACT-R-users at act-r.psy.cmu.edu>"<ACT-R-users at act-r.psy.cmu.edu>
>> Date:	02/14/2012 05:54 PM
>> Subject:	Re: [ACT-R-users] Overhauling the ACT-R website
>> Sent by:	act-r-users-bounces at act-r.psy.cmu.edu
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I was about to queue the multiple advantages of wordpress until I read Wayne's reply ;). To sum it up (and that has pretty much been my job for the past 5 years: portals/content/accessibility) I would put it this way:
>> - Low-end, basic HTML serving with minimal hassle and small application: wordpress.
>> - Medium-end, some "semantic" features and high extensibility (large active communities): Drupal, Magnolia (mainly depends on the software stack one wants to control)
>> - High-end, fully "enterprise" capable: Liferay, Exo (java based)
>>
>> I personally would push toward something that is starting to be semantic-aware, as to best leverage content (linked-data) and take advantage of the multiplicity of content-enhancement that are popping all over the web.
>>
>> Here's my 2 cents, and wish you the best for the site project,
>>
>> _Stephane
>>
>> On Feb 14, 2012, at 11:31 PM, Gray, Wayne wrote:
>> Surely not Wordpress!! How about Drupal??
>>
>>
>> On 12-Feb-14, at 22:13 , Animesh Sharma wrote:
>> Dear John,
>> If you are looking for simply managing online content, depending on traffic, I would recommend either http://wordpress.org/ (low traffic) or http://www.joomla.org/ (high trafffic). For application development, I would suggest http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/overview.html .
>> Regards,
>> Animesh
>>
>> --------------------------"The Answer Lies In The Genome"--------------------------
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 9:09 PM, john<ja0s at andrew.cmu.edu>  wrote:
>> Members of the ACT-R community:
>>
>> The current ACT-R website probably could use some improvements.
>> Suggestions welcome
>>
>> We are also finding it increasing difficulty to maintain the current
>> site and are looking for a better, more modern system.   Suggestions
>> again welcome.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> John
>>
>> --
>> John R. Anderson
>> Richard King Mellon Professor
>> of Psychology and Computer Science
>> Carnegie Mellon University
>> Pittsburgh, PA 15213
>> Office: Baker Hall 345D
>> Phone: 412-417-7008
>> Fax:     412-268-2844
>> email: ja at cmu.edu
>> URL:  http://act.psy.cmu.edu/
> ___________________________________________
> Dario Salvucci, Ph.D.
> Associate Professor&  Graduate Advisor
> Department of Computer Science
> Drexel University
> http://www.cs.drexel.edu/~salvucci/
>
>
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