For those who care, I am currently in the process of porting Theologia to Greymatter. Why does this (grey)matter? Well, though there are numerous content management systems out there, Greymatter is well supported and, more importantly, my brother and I are both using it already. And it’s free. And it’s Perl. Though I am one of those worthless manager types now, I used to do real work and at one point was fairly proficient at Perl (I even have the clipping from PC Magazine on a short write-up that mentioned a site for which I had written a 10k line Perl engine… not that we went anywhere with it). I can still hack out some Perl if needed, so I prefer my freeware coded in Perl than, say, Python.
Anyway, the benefit to the consumer will hopefully be much more frequent updates to the content. I’m writing a script right now that will present the content alphabetized by title and organized by category. Then I’ll have to go crazy on the templates. And then we launch with a platform that is no longer dependent on me loading my brother’s pre-coded papers, updating each index, and then publishing the changes.
Moveable Type is a content-management system written in Perl that looks like it has nice features…particularly the XML RSS stuff.
Perl is rapidly becoming the lifeblood of my work environment. Of course, there are the nay-sayers…a big complaint seems to be there are 500 ways of doing something in Perl compared to one or two good ways in C++. But there’s no going back. When I look at the languages and tools I use today compared to, say, 5 years ago—the improvement is pretty dramatic.
ODonnellWeb is running on MT. I used GM for a few months but two out of the blue errors, the final one that I could not recover from, led me to try MT. I\’ve been trying to get PHPWebSite running for VHEA but the layout templates in PHP are just evil and I may give up and use MT there too.