By Jon Griffin
I used wordpress for a while, and since I despise mysql and don’t really like a patchy server, I quit using it. There were however many things that could be learned from it.
One of the beauties of OpenACS is that it is extremely flexible. One of the big disadvantages it that it is not on the “cutting edge” of net technology.
Due to it’s roots in the anti-commercialism’s of the webs beginnings, the “look and feel” of OpenACS has always lagged behind many LAMP applications. When I worked at ArsDigita, the general feeling was follow Tufte’s books, especially, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition 
There are some attempts at present to make this happen, but it is mostly in the context of dotLrn and unfortunately much of the work done is not readily returned to OpenACS core where it rightfully should be. Here is a list I compiled in November 2006 of some of the things that OpenACS needs to compete. It is not exhaustive, and some has been added to xowiki by Gustaf Nuemann while I bothered him in the interem.
I truly believe that OpenACS is a great, if somewhat creaking with age, platform. So much is built-in that is simply not present in other frameworks. Things such as a package system that takes advantage of the common community database, permissions, awesome database access, a cohesive view of the whole site, not just a bunch of separate projects that get glued on different url’s like most all LAMP solutions.
The list of additional functionality needed:
Ping – This may be present already, but is buried and I couldn’t figure it out. i.e. pingomatic, sortof related to other social bookmarking note below.
Incoming links (technocrati) - Who is coming in from sites such as technocrati
Stats – Who visited, page loads, referrer, ip address etc.
Live versus draft - This is now in xowiki
Search tracking – This is in my patched version of search.
Digg, etc. social bookmarking – This is in xowiki and should probably be modified slightly to add more links to social bookmarking than are already present. Here is a sample of what is out there: http://www.maxpower.ca/bookmarking/
email to friend – I don’t think this is difficult.
Linkroll – What are you linking to in your content? This should be really easy if using content repository functionality.
Feedburner – Forward all your feed traffic to feedburner. Helps with link popularity.
Landing site – Show related content based on what the referer is. It should show search terms etc.
http://theundersigned.net/2006/06/landing-sites-11
Popularity contest – What are the most popular pages on your site, google has this functionality, but it shouldn’t be to hard to add and would be great to show your readers what is hot.
Reddit this
Multipage – This is now available with xowiki and its book formatting.
More link in markup – this is sort of in xowiki.
Auto thumbnails - This is somewhat in xowiki, but could probably be tweaked a little.
Posts and comments since last visit – Just what it says, what is new since I was last on. We track this, it is time to do something with it.
Another thing that is really needed after the css templating is taken care of is, a way for someone to change the css through a web interface. We need to store more in the database (i.e. what/where is the file(s)), but it can be sourced at startup and any change if needed.
Please comment.
About Jon Griffin
Jon Griffin has been playing music since he was 7 years old. He is also an avid cook and expert in beer, brewing and other beverages. He owns salsablanca.com and jongriffin.com as well as other sites
He went to Grove School of Music where he studied songwriting and composing and arranging (yes it was fun doing a big band chart every week!).
He then started studying Cuban music and went on to study with Richard Egües, Julian Fernandez, Emilo Vega and Pancho Amat.
He has recorded several CD’s in Cuba in various styles, including Traditional Son, Nueva Trova and Cha cha cha. Recording with such giants as Richard Egües, Jose Antonio Rodriguez, Ban Rarra, and Enrique Pla.
Jon Griffin also teaches about beer at the William F. Harrah College of Hotel Administration, Food & Beverage Management Department at University of Nevada Las Vegas.He is an avid homebrewer, an active member of SNAFU and the former owner of brew-kits.com in Las Vegas Nevada.
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