During the last few months I've been installing and evaluating a bunch of the public domain Content Management Systems. I've mentioned previously that I'm not particularly impressed by them. They're pretty much geared towards idiots that want to launch full-featured websites. As a consequence they need to make every aspect of running a web portal appeal to the masses. So they can't call something 'keywords' or 'categories' - instead it's 'taxonomy'. Because 'taxonomy' is more understandable by the average human than 'keywords' or 'categories'. Right. On four out of five of these packages it took an hour of searching menus to find a place to set the site title. Free software. You get what you pay for.

But I found one that wasn't too bad. It's called 'Drupal'. It's got some bugs and quirks, and is similiarly obtuse, but it seems to do quite a bit. So I loaded it up over on the floozee site (that's dot com, hint hint).   Multiple blogs, discussion boards, event calendar, newsfeeds, buddylists, etc. Pretty nice little app (once I fixed a few bugs). Oh, and it's got a crude but functional XMLRPC interface. I would have said that it's the perfect launching pad for my next great blog idea - except that it pretty much embodies my entire next great blog idea. I've got some configuration work to do, but basically you build a community blog portal that's tied to an event calendar, latest newsfeeds, online discussion groups, etc. Sigh... guess it wan't such an original idea after all. But now I've got a framework with all the right code to do what I was thinking, so maybe I'll figure out a unique twist yet.