Suggestions for open source frameworks for web development? « Digital Humanities Questions & Answers

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Suggestions for open source frameworks for web development?

(10 posts) (5 voices)

Asked 5 years ago by Jennifer Sano-Franchini
Latest answer from Patrick Murray-John

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Jennifer Sano-Franchini
Member
I'm looking for a fairly user-friendly open source protocol for developing a web-based project that basically combines organized, user-contributed links (kind of like an online bibliography) with tagging capabilities and discussion boards. It would be great if I could develop something easy for users to navigate, as the site would be geared toward college-level writing students and instructors.

Right now I'm looking at Drupal and BuddyPress, and I'm also thinking to use APIs, possibly from delicious, Mendeley, and I'm interested in looking into OpenCalais for pulling metadata from the linked sources. But, I'm really new to all of this and I'm wondering if anyone else has any other suggestions of tools that I might look into using--?
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Posted 5 years ago Permalink
ajturner
Member

Hi Jennifer, you're conflating some concepts together. A protocol would be something like HTTP, or even an XML format such as Atom. Drupal and BuddyPress are open-source content management systems (CMS), and delicious, et al. are web platforms.

If you mean a CMS or tool to use - I think Wordpress with the BuddyPress plugin is a good direction. Wordpress is very easy to install, configure, and maintain. Each link would be a "post" and you can extend to have additional metadata elements.

However - Wordpress by itself has a single way to "publish", which could confuse users that expect a specific UI. So you could then use another plugin that provides an interface for users that is fit within how you want people to contribute. So it will take looking for a specific plugin(s) and configuring templates. However that should be much easier in Wordpress than learning Drupal if you have never used it before.

You should think about the longevity of the project (just for a semester, or until the end of time) and how you will preserve the contributions and maintain the tool. The simplest would be a Google Doc or Spreadsheet :)

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
Jennifer Sano-Franchini
Member

Thank you for the clarification (re: CMS/web platforms) and for the advice! I am hoping that this site is something that lasts (or at least I'd like this to be a possibility), so I'm more than willing to put in the time and effort to learn Drupal if it will better suit what I want to do. I'll look into what you suggested about Wordpress, though.

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
ethan.watrall
Member

Replying to @Jennifer Sano-Franchini's post:

I very much would like to echo Andrew's suggestion of looking at Buddy Press for the project.

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
Patrick Murray-John

To me, any Drupal vs. WP evaluation usually comes down to what relationships need to exist between items, and what metadata about items needs to be exposed. WP is strong with prose text, but not so much with metadata. And so, if the categories/tags of WP is all the metadata you'd need, WP would work well.

If, however, you need to work with more information about the items as part of the organization, then it'd probably aim toward Drupal. (Especially true since the Fields module in Drupal 7 makes it easy to set those things up.

So, I guess another way to think of the question is to first nail down how precise and rigorous the organization needs to be. What kinds of things do you have in mind for that, and about how people will use the site?

Hope that helps,
Patrick

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
joris.van.zundert
Member

Can I add that imho WordPress out performs Drupal by far in usability/GUI aspects? Of course there's always a matter of taste in that, but if you're looking for something that people will like to use and has a shallow learning curve, I'd put my money on WordPress. The metadata issue that was raised is likely to be true, but if in real need of elaborate metadata schemes, WordPress would allow for amending such out of the box, or as plugin, or even as adaptation of the core (latter not recommended though given future upgrades).

Hope that's useful, best
-- Joris

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
Jennifer Sano-Franchini
Member

Thanks, this is all very helpful. I don't think I need anything too rigorous in terms of organization, but I was thinking I'd like to be able to pull things like bibliographic information (title, author, journal, date of publication) from the links that users submit. I'm still figuring out if I want users to be able to organize the links in more than one way--at the very least I'd like to be able to organize the links by publication date, but I'm not sure if there are other schemes I might consider. The basic idea is that the site should put the different links pertaining to a particular issue into conversation with one another. This way teachers will be able to use the information for teaching and students will be able to use the information for writing research papers.

I think at this point I will try both Drupal and WordPress out (along with plugins) and see how they work for me. Thanks again!

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
Patrick Murray-John

Another thought --- have you looked at using Zotero's online groups for this? For the basic functionality you are describing, you might be able to use that and not have to build anything.

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
Jennifer Sano-Franchini
Member

The reason I'm leaning more toward a website is because I want it to be super easy for users to access (they won't have to download anything, or use Firefox--I know Zotero's developing a standalone and trying to make it usable across different browsers, but I haven't had too much luck with that). Also, I'm hoping to be able to eventually accommodate a relatively large user-base. And, I wanted to have a bit more control over the design and extra features. :)

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
Patrick Murray-John

Ah, makes sense. In fact, the project I'm working on now at CHNM is at least in part addressing many of the same issues. One way or another, though, it's looking like we'll aim for a direct Zotero connection to the site, and we're also waffling between WordPress/BuddyPress and Drupal (though leaning heavily toward Drupal for some of the other features we'll need.

Good luck!

Posted 5 years ago Permalink

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