How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Blog

Thanks to encouragement from Mark Frazier at Open World, I’m more seriously exploring existing platforms and content management systems as digital hubs for local communities. I had been thinking along the lines of a fully custom app that I could open-source, but the development and documentation overhead would be high on a project like that. Right now I’m looking at Ning and WordPress as alternatives.

WordPress has the advantage of a standalone installation and very strong developer documentation. A standalone package is attractive because it does not rely on third party hosting, and could operate on a local mesh network without internet connection. Ning, on the other hand, is a hosted solution and the documentation is less comprehensive. However, setup is a cinch.

My inclination right now is to prototype a solution in Ning, then create a standalone WordPress package that can be installed on any server. I will probably end up creating custom plugins, especially for wordpress.

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