We have been looking to take the next step with respect to our portal (https://TGSoc.org) and our heritage site (https://ThomasGardnerSociety.org) for sometime. Yesterday, we put a comment on our Devlog page. But, as we have mentioned, there are roles and roles. Each of these requires its own hat. And a small firm requires people who can were several hats.
Albeit, the necessary multitasking can be daunting. As we know with computer systems, and knew before with manufacturing’s need to handle preparation and such for jobs, swapping is both time-consuming and many times inefficient. We might seem to juggle, or our perception shows that that, but we are really changing hats at a cost that may or may not be immediately apparent. Its accumulation will come.
So, CMS is on the table. We started this when MS pushed people out of their system back in 2012. That was too early with respect to the mobile devices to have a huge impact which came not much later, by 2014. On the other hand, the core issues still remain the same. There are people and pages. How do we match these up? How many ways, to boot? Huge.
Presentation is one issue. How things look, whether what is given meets the demand and a whole lot more. Have you noticed how many have converged to one type of look that is oriented to the small scale of the mobile thingee? Take it from a laptop user who has extra terminals, it’s like peering down a rabbit hole (more ways than one) when what we need is this multi-phasic approach to handle the swapping needs. As in, for good browsers, lots of tabs as well as windows. There are complications related to native modes of these devices.
Laptop? Yes. We are finally going to get smartphones. However, in terms of apps and distributed processing, we are onto the technical aspects. After all, we are talking a shift in a platform of which there have been many other small things, in the past. The new dynamic has to do with the demand which is driven by unknown human requirements, yet to be tackled in a good manner.
But, jumping ahead. We can use Drupal as an example. We looked at this back in the early days as well as some of its peers (Concrete, Joomla, and more). A major non-profit which has a broad scope with respect to people and time (centuries of view) picked Drupal. Will be looking further into that. But, for now, see their site for a categorizing of some approaches based upon requirements.
Drupal: Retail, FinTech, High tech, Higher Ed, etc. (see By industry). There are three major views provided: by developers, marketers, agencies. One selling point? It comes from a community that is Open Source, versus those closed ones where people want money for investors (something for nothing).
Right now, we are supporting three of these with our time and effort. In fact, The Economist, recently, in a review of the mess of the Internet, mentioned one of these efforts as being one of the few islands of sanity in the whole of the affair. The TGS, Inc., as we have mentioned, has the historical scope of technology within its focus. Will continue to do so.
As said, we are on the way where we will have a regular technical focus. A good thing about Drupal is that it provides the integrative mode that is needed with software which is both complicated and not. The disparate world nowadays of all of the types of presentation devices has brought whole new issues to fore with a slew of techniques having been tried to handle these.
So, the presence, now, of things like GitHub or other Git approaches, allows us to see what others have done in more detail than was available before. That is, where we talk of availability with respect to common means for getting to the information as well some modicum of normality in representation and such.
Take mobility which is about 10 years old from the technical problem viewpoint. There are 24K results from a search on mobile at the Drupal.org site. Specifics related to things beyond normal are covered quite well such as this look at native mobile applications. And Drupal is only one of very many CMS approaches. This type, and level, of documentation is very nice to see.
So we can learn things beyond that related to the experience of using a smartphone. For instance, one thing that people have converged to is the simple one-column deal that looks good. One has to wonder of efficiency, though. Not only do these small devices chew more power in some situations than expected, they drain the battery when doing anything of note. What a mismatch?
So, everyone, backpacks with huge batteries as the future? Or, pulling along some wheeled item that ports the necessary power source?
We won’t be venturing down side tracks too much. Only if they pertain to our focus. Which is? Truth engineering which involves technology, human studies, and a large bit of stuff that relates in a multidisciplinary mode.