I was interested to read Bizcommunity’s article Mutiny on the Mail & Guardian blog.
Blogmark (I still call it Blogspot, though any links referring to the old name don’t even work anymore, a big web no-no) has been plagued by technical problems. I subscribe to their RSS feed, and keep an eye on what’s happening, and some of the comments have not been pretty!
The article describes the site as Citizen Journalism, but I’d say that’s pushing it. That may have been the intention upon launch, but most of the posting on the site is idle chatter. Some of the best early bloggers, such as Vincent Maher, seem to have deserted it, and are more active on their own blogs now. Nevertheless, it’s a community, and one which deserves to be supported, and M&G have let themselves down.
Looking at the issue more technically, Blogmark uses Drupal. Some of the criticism has claimed M&G made the wrong choice of technology. I can’t comments on this, as I don’t know what expertise the tech team has, and what their intentions are or were, but Drupal is a powerful CMS with blogging capabilities tacked on. As a blog application, it’s not as fully-featured as some of the dedicated alternatives, but it’s solid, well-supported software, and the other integrated modules may have swung the decision. It’s also not one of the easiest to administer, and I suspect (though this is only a guess) what happened is that when upgrading (Drupal recently released a new version), not all of the modules were activated. Drupal requires quite a bit of setup work to get things going properly, and a little more care than other alternatives, and clearly this work wasn’t done properly.
Perhaps they should send their developers down to BarCamp Cape Town, where Drupal core developer Adrian Rossouw is apparently giving a presentation.
Tags: BarCampCapeTown
Yeah its a strange thing that happened there, though i like to check back from time to time. It’s almost like it was a stepping stone for the bloggers to get onto their systems. I personally love wordpress.