I've been tinkering with my slashcode based web site
Slashcode reminds me of Unix and Perl. Difficult to get used to at first, but full of nice little bits that continually pop out.
For example,
I just discovered "sections". This is going to be really useful. My site contains articles on mountaineering, sailing, climbing, adventure racing, etc.. I like reading about all these different topics, but I can imagine that some users would just want to see a page with climbing or sailing only content. I like the way slashdot does this. I never really noticed this feature before, but now I tend to go straight to
This software is still pretty opaque to me. The online documentation is pretty bad, so I just ordered the "Building Weblogs With Slash" book from amazon. I'm assuming that the authors are people who contribute to the slashcode project. If so, then that's fine; I don't mind sending some money their way. After all, selling documentation was always touted as one of the open source business models.
So slashcode is pretty powerful, but is it appropriate for non-technical users? That is an experiment I am conducting now. I imagine that the readers of my website will be pretty non-technically oriented and will be confused by the some of the more technical aspects of the interface. The html markup in comment blocks confuses people. I've already gotten the "Why are my paragraphs all mushed together?" question.
People are also going to want those smiley icons that permeate the php based bulletin boards and the ability to post images. Not sure if those are possible. Guess I'll have to read the book.
There are so many options available to users, it may be overwhelming. I don't know if limiting the displayed features/options is possible, but I may try to do that as well.
