[Smaug] CMS strengths/weaknesses

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Rob Beckett (subwolf at gmail.com):

> But, I would say that a lot of sites follow that schematic, because it
> seems to work best (See http://blogshares.com/ *cough).

Well, certainly, but that's because they're oriented around news items /
comments / blogs.  The main Web presence of a user group, in my
experience, tends to get most reasonably expressed as an ordered tree of
pages, rather than a Drupal-style vertical list of date-ordered
news-like items (with or without comments).

Now, what can be really cool is a CMS or wiki _attached_ to a regular 
ordered tree of pages that occupies the top level.  We at BayLISA have
recently started doing this, specifically in order to offer
participatory access to the members.  Jennifer Davis, our president,
chose to implement that part of the site in, yes, Drupal.

The main, older site is the top-level http://www.baylisa.org/ tree, and 
the Drupal portion will be reachable from
http://www.baylisa.org/members/ when activated.  (At least, that was
Jennifer's plan when last I heard.)

> It wouldn't be hard to deviate from that style at all, if need be. :)

I'm glad to hear that, but have not found a single example.  Do you know
of any?  Ones that don't have the otherwise ubiquitous Drupal/Slashdot/etc.
general layout:

                H E A D E R


   S        news story                 S
   I           comments links          I
   D                                   D
   E        older news story           E
   B           comments links          B
   A        [...]                      A
   R                                   R


                F O O T E R