As part of a class project I’ve been reading the Online-News mailing list and responding to some of the issues and discussion brought up there.

This week did not see a great deal of discussion per se.  One poster asked for useful/innovative tools that CMS (content management systems) have.  The only response so far said that flexibility was the best feature his CMS had, so that his programmers could add/alter modules without paying a bunch of money for consultants.   In his site, they added RSS feeds and added a simple interface for editors to use.

Last week there was a long thread that started when someone asked which blogging software they should use for a student project on a Windows platform. One suggestion was Moveable Type, and there was some back-and forth about how easy it is to make changes to built-in templates with CSS.  Typepad and Pmachine were two alternatives that were also mentioned.  There was some talk about integrating it into a CMS and even using Flash (which one writer pointed out, might be silly if most of the content is just text).  Several people talked about the difficulties they had setting up MT for multiple authors, and gave some suggestions to make it easier on the original poster if they decide to go that route.  RSS was also mentioned, which is something I know little about and should probably look into.