WAMP & CMS

Caveat lector a real geek post…you may wish to blog-on…

Tonight I took a 30 minute break from studying and decided to finally install a desktop server. I’ve been toying with the idea for about a year—just a tad chicken to muck around with a desktop that works just fine.

EasyPHP was just that easy—about 5 minutes from downloading to up and running! Next came the installations of TikiWiki and WordPress. About 10 minutes and 5 minutes respectfully. WordPress is always so easy to install, even more so on a desktop server (and a truly private blog). The reason for the TikiWiki installation was to explore the CMS features of a Wiki application. It was going to be either MediaWiki or TikiWiki and I had some difficulty previously getting MediaWiki and DokuWiki running on my Dreamhost account.

I see a natural evolution from weblogs and forums to wikis to true all encompassing CMS systems. Its all coming together in application like Drupal, TikiWiki, and the still beta JotSpot. Interesting post at Lessig on Code v2.0 and the CC-Wiki license.

My predictions are that CMS will go big time—someone’s going to snap up Jotspot or take some other wiki project and make it like TypePad is to MovableType. For that matter, what is SixApart going to do with LiveJournal—I see alot of potential morphing of MovableType and LiveJournal into SA’s entry in the CMS arena. And, then there is the imminent release of Yahoo 360° coming on the 31^st. Blogger is looking mighty long in the tooth—Google has to be looking for their CMS entré.

For me, I’m sitting with my ExpressionEngine for now—the forum module is coming, they’ve added a gallery module (just my dog for now). They’ll have to ramp it up to keep up with the potential of Jotspot. I’ve toyed with my vBulletin installation and even got it skinned to match the blog—but to run a forum well is too high a maintenance in terms of time and commitment.

I have test sites for WordPress, MovableType, vBulletin and Drupal (just added this week) on my Dreamhost account. Drupal is a fantastic CMS contender—blogs, pages and forums. I have my Blogger sites saving to Dreamhost. And, now I’ve finally added WAMP—Windows running Apache, MySQL and PHP as a sandbox on my Dell box. Sometime ago I saw a nice article (and didn’t save it) where AMP was installed on a USB fob “drive”—anyone seen one of those or heard of them, please let me know…OK, enough procrastination…