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[Rob Seastrom]

"Bennett Z. Kobb" <bkobb at ieee.org> writes:

> Both Obama campaigns
> US Dept of State
> iLounge, the largest iOS site
> Governor of California
> A List Apart (immediately recognizable by anyone in web development)

Encouraging.  Well, except for 1, 2, and 4.  :)

> EE has a good security record. Checking the DHS vuln database for EE
> showed four records; Joomla had 774.

Over what timeframe?  My recollection of Joomla was over twice that
many (sorry, no citations here).  A number of vulnerabilities that
small might mean that nobody's looking closely enough too.

> Every CMS has its partisans. My own reaction to Joomla and WP is
> unfavorable as far as usability and templating are concerned. I led a
> development project on a Joomla site for a large client. I thanked
> heaven when it was over and could return to EE development.

I think we can agree that Joomla is a total non-starter.  I only
brought it up due to the installed base.  I don't have any Windows
machines in my critical path these days either...  :)

> My problem with Drupal was its yawning list of unsupported and poorly
> documented plugins.

You must really love PHP and Perl then.  :)

> We tried to install a Drupal based collaboration
> site and hired a Drupal expert, but she could not install it on any
> platform and gave up.

I have bad news for you - you didn't hire a Drupal expert.  

> That said, I know Drupal 7 is popular, particularly in government; and
> now it has commercial support.

Which doesn't hurt, though realistically we (AMRAD) are not the kind
of organization to pay for, or use, commercial support packages.  

> As to Textpattern (TXP), I consider it an antidote to WordPress and
> love working with it. It has long been a favorite of designers, but
> certainly is a smaller community than WP. Almost every other CMS
> is. Ghost is also making a splash as a WP competitor; it is Node based
> where I think more CMS will move to eventually.

Now *that* is highly interesting to me.  Getting away from PHP is a
huge win in my book; there are just so many horrible coding practices
and poorly done libraries out there.  Nowhere near as bad as CPAN, but
then again few things are.

My early experiences with Node are quite good.  My first little
project with Node involved almost no Javascript experience; I got
myip.seastrom.com running in 20 minutes.  The next day, 20 more
minutes got IPv6 support in the same event loop (despite kind of shady
documentation for v6; this is not unique to Node).  Node also has a
reputation for being super fast.  Doesn't hurt a bit to be
lightweight, event-driven, and non-blocking everywhere.  Reminds me of
programming on old Macs.  Guess everything old is new again.

On the downside, Ghost looks pretty new.  I'll have to spin up an
instance and see how I like it.

Thanks for the pointer.

-r