One big happy CMS family
Slashdot has another winner. Now we’re talking open CMS interoperability. The question put forth in the Advogato article is whether or not interoperability and the standards required for it is really neccesary in the CMS world.
The answer is (in my mind) a qualified yes. I like to mess around with different CMS systems; in the past I’ve used Blosxom, Blogger, and now Movable Type. I’ve also done my site by hand using emacs, notepad, and whatever else was at hand. I’ve settled into a confortable mode wherein I write posts locally in emacs or TextPad, then paste them into my CMS of the week. Blosxom was nice because all I had to do was stick the text file in my site directory and I was done. However, Blosxom didn’t deliver all the features I wanted, so now I have to cut and paste my posts into MT. Fortunately, MT supports the BloggerAPI via XML-RPC and I can use on of many blogging apps to do my posts (though I’m lazy and don’t). My hope is that eventually internet publishing via a CMS will be transparent: I write my piece, save it, and it gets whisked away via some (secure) path to my site, which is rebuilt to reflect the change. Interoperability makes this happen, and more importantly, it means that when I find the next cool toy to play with, I can port my posts with no trouble.
Now for the qualification: why not start by supporting those standards that exist? WebDAV, BloggerAPI, RSS/RDF, and XML-RPC make a lot of interoperability easy. Take a good look at where interop whould go, and in the mean time, let us post away.