Alex Reid

Over the past two years, I’ve been asked by many organizations and business start-ups which Content Management System (CMS) platform is right for them: WordPress, Drupal or Joomla.

For individuals and small businesses, I suggest WordPress.

For organizations with money, I suggest Drupal.

For anyone with money and time, I suggest Joomla.

Here’s a cute infographic you should check out.

Usability

Drupal is more of an API or framework than a high-level publishing platform. It’s made by and for developers who want to get their hands dirty under the hood playing around with the engine. Newbies beware.

The complexity of Drupal allows for a powerful taxonomy mechanism built in that allows for maximum content categorization. Drupal is better used for sites wanting to create a large community (say like a large membership base or a social network platform).

WordPress on the other hand was built by a community of bloggers and increasingly over the past couple of years, web site owners using WordPress as a CMS platform. It is a publishing platform.

You can also publish a ‘network’ of blogs like the New York Times did.

WordPress is very easy to use. Install is a snap, and upgrades can be uploaded using a friendly FTP upload or even auto-updated without any extra work, which is really handy for those starting off as a web site owner.

Security

WordPress used to be behind on this aspect but has really caught up in the past 18 months with the other CMS platforms like Drupal or Joomla.

Flexibility

Drupal has 7,000 modules/plugins and WordPress has over 12,000 plugins. Drupal has almost 800 themes and WordPress has nearly 1300.

Coming about on an agreement is easy.

Getting people to honour their agreements, not so much.

What’s worse is when a client or company is very much in a position to be reasonable and honest but they refuse to be that way. Lately I’ve been taking on some lessons from professionals in the field of collections and I’ve learned that no matter how much you’d like the business or the money, it’s ‘no pay, no play’.

It’s simply not worth doing business with someone who puts payment as a last priority; these people will waste your time. I write this post for other business owners who undoubtedly deal with situations like this.

Car accidents are a leading cause of death, especially for younger people.

In 2005, the UN said that the number of road traffic deaths and injuries would exceed the damage wrought by HIV by the year 2020. The World Health Organization (WHO) predicted that that road traffic injuries will rise to become the fifth leading cause of death by 2030.

Most of all, it’s human error that often causes accidents.

Nevada became the first jurisdiction in the world to allow autonomus vehicles on public roads last month. For the past few years, DARPA has been driving (no pun intended) towards driverless vehicles (think robot soldiers), and Google was behind the lobbying so that they could test their driverless project, which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge.

Sebastian Thrun on Google’s driverless car (Youtube).

Google wouldn’t say why they choose Nevada, and while it could be that the Google founders like Burning Man, the state is known for its testing grounds – nuclear weapons and rocket cars.

Google has ben testing a fleet of seven vehicles, consisting of six Toyota Prii and an Audi TT. Their software drives the vehicles at the speed limit it has stored on its maps and maintains its distance from other vehicles using its system of sensors. The system provides an override that allows a human driver to take control of the car by stepping on the brake or turning the wheel, similar to cruise control systems already in cars. (source)

Most auto technology already uses sensors and cameras, but most of the advances available have simply been corrective or assisting technologies like the “Lane Keep Assist” ability of the 2010 Toyota Prius that uses a camera to detect lane markers and automatically steers the car toward the center of the lane.

Google says they’re just playing around with the idea, and no matter the commercial value of such an idea, the social benefits alone in preventing car accidents, by drunk or other human error, is an idea beyond worth merit.  I see this as a positive alternative for drunk drivers, but chauffeurs might be out of work soon.

Safety is the sell here, and it may still be simply an assisting program, but even with the risk of computer error, I see huge potential for this to revolutionise the auto market and save lives.

Somehow I suspect the built in GPS sytem will be Google Earth.

It’s been exactly 137 months (11 years and 5 months) since I started up newwinnipeg.com but now it’s time to move on to bigger and brighter things as the goodbye and thank you note, here, states.

I’ve learned a lot about public engagement, and the problems with anonymity in this type of forum, and I believe the moderators did too (who shall remain anonymous along with the rest of the community).

The timing to close the web site has been way overdue, partly due to branding confusion between the business (.net) and the community (.com), partly a liability concern but mostly because it was too time consuming; the moderators and myself are entering our mid-thirties and forties. We have other projects that we would rather spend our time on.

I know some people will be sad, maybe even disappointed but it should go without saying that they are free to take on the torch and maintain a web site for the next decade. Much like being a politician, it’s a thankless job, but the stories told and the experiences we had were well worth it.

Thank you Winnipeg!