Forum Moderators: phranque
I'm looking for some kind of script package like a CMS to weave together a very large amount of text with historical information and timelines as collaborative effort with different types of users.
I'd like to put together a website that will tie together the life works of a religious figure. There is a huge amount of books, transcribed lectures, letters, journals, audio files and related data. Plus quite a bit of biographical information, historical context, etc including the activities/biographies/recollections of the people around him.
I'd like to be able to connect the historical information of his own religious sub-culture/organization and world events with his writing/lectures to provide a context to better understand the writing. What was happening to him, those around him and in the world.
So as you read a particular section of a book, you could choose to find out what was happening during the writing of that passage. Maybe see a video or audio. Additionally, much of the writing is a complex, interwoven series of commentaries and observations of events thousands of years ago and there is huge and complex historical narrative and timeline of the particular religious tradition to juxtapose with the modern context.
Yet even more, a controlled method for user commentary, both academic and otherwise is important.
If the project develops as I hope it does, a custom package may be in order, but I need something to get started.
Any recommendations?
Thanx!
I'd suggest Typo3 or Midgard. These are professional VERY high end CMSs, and you need an experienced developer to use them properly, but they can do basically anything.
As for a plug and play CMS, I can't think of one that does everything you want
I was hoping for one that I can use on a web motel.
How about something that will just do the document indexing and searching? Just that alone will keep me busy for a while. There are many, many thousands of pages. Indexing, cross referencing and searching is important.
If you really dont have the funds/resources to make a custom CMS right now, id just use moveabletype then you can organization your articles how you want, preparing you for the day when you move to your custom CMS
TYPO3 and Midgard:I was hoping for one that I can use on a web motel.
Typo3 is installable on shared hosting, no problem. I've installed it on 5 or 6 shared hosts now I think, and never had any kind of problem more serious than having to ask the host to install ImageMagick. You might have problems if you're dealing with a very low-priced budget host, but then with them, you might have problems with much less complex programs than Typo3...
Typo3 is definitely worth checking out, but besides it, and given your requirements, I think you might want to check out Xaraya [xaraya.com]. It has a very sophisticated way of dealing with information that lets you build quite complex information architectures if you need to. In some ways, Xaraya is not yet fully mature (they're just moving up to the 1.0 release), but it has some extremely good features that are not available, or not as well implemented in any other CMS that I know of (I'm thinking specifically of Xaraya's hooks and dynamic data features).
-B
Just remembered: I don't have much experience with it, but it seems to me that Drupal [drupal.org] has similar information-organization features...I could be wrong though.
