WordPress as a CMS?

As the co-editor and web-admin¹ of the online journal darkmatter, the opensource blog software platform of WordPress (WP) is used to run the journal. I’m not a proper coder, but a bit of (php, html, css) knowledge really does go a long way with wordpress. And the original theme (Light 1.0) has been modified in order to make it work like a journal.

However, to be able to use WP in this way, a number of plugins are required. Clearly what makes WP stand out from the crowd is its vast plugin community, enabling to remarkably extend its features and make it work more like a CMS.

But there’s a downside. The number of plugins can start to proliferate if you want CMS features. For example, to display multiple authorship for an article requires a plugin (called co-authors, which is relatively new and overcomes the short-comings of an existing multiple authors plugin). While the latest WP has a tagging system it’s still basic, so another plugin is needed for that. Similarly to properly print-format an article, you need another plugin. (And there’s still no properly working PDF conversion plugin). And the workflow is almost non-existent, even with plugins such as role manager.

The problem I’m finding, if you want to do something more than a single authored blog on WP, you need plugins. And plugins need to be continually updated, as WP is constantly upgrading its core package. Plugin updates doesn’t always happen. And then there’s the overhead involved in keeping the site up-to-date and properly functioning.

This constant upgrading (and testing) cycle is high maintenance… Sorry to say, but I may quit using WP for darkmatter.

Therefore, I’m checking out alternatives to WP, which have more integrated features and designed to be used by multiple authors. Some opensource CMS possibilities are Joomla and drupal (the latter seems especially attractive, though has a higher learning curve due to its inherent flexibility). Also there’s OJS, a dedicated opensource journal system. It has solid support, though its workflow system is cumbersome and may not suit our needs on darkmatter as it reproduces the conventions of a print journal.

I’m leaning towards drupal at the moment, but early days yet.

Edit [24/03/08]: Having played around with drupal, it certainly does have a higher learning curve than WP! And is more accurately described as a Content Management Framework (rather than merely a CMS). Clearly powerful and it has many more features integrated compared to WP. But it’s an unfair comparison to make, even though WP is moving beyond blogging capabilities.

The juries still out on whether to go the drupal route (which would take a few months getting to grips with for me). Continuing with WP with a new strategy of only using significant/essential plugins, and not attempting to follow WP core upgrades (apart from security updates). That is, upgrading darkmatter say once every 6 or 12 months would make things more manageable?

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[1] No, I don’t like the maculinist term webmaster

Wikipedia and Iraq

The shambolic, illegal occupation of Iraq by Western powers has resulted in countless deaths (murder) of civilians.

The ‘war against terror’ is as much an info-war as it is one involving brutal death and destruction.

Enter Wikipedia into the affray. It’s an amazing resource. While controversy exists over the accuracy of its contents, a more interesting question is how it contests the authority of conventional (expert) knowledge. Moreover, what Wikipedia reveals is the politics of knowledge itself. A significant example is how the contents of a page about Iraqi “resistance” has been edited to “insurgency“.¹

If you are unfamiliar with the principles of a wiki, it enables readers to collectively edit a page, and the page’s edited history is stored. In the case of Wikipedia, if controversy arises, the page can be locked disabling any further edits.

Click the thumbnail image below to compare how the key terms over the entry about Iraq have been edited/altered. A case of rewriting how we are meant to grasp war and violence in Iraq?

Notes
Originally posted on the darkmatter Journal
¹For the latest Wikipedia entry now entitled ‘Iraq and Insurgency’, click here. (And has the article reverted back to include the term ‘resistance’?)

Copyfight - Forget YouTube?

There are many ‘web2.0′ video sharing/hosting sites these days, though YouTube (YT) reigns supreme. Now owned by Google, YT is becoming the search site for video.

However, if you’re intending to upload your own video, there are some serious restrictions when using YT. Not only is there a limit to the length of material, but YT’s Terms & Conditions (see especially point 6) leave a lot to be desired.

A comparison between different video sharing sites indicates that YT doesn’t allow Creative Commons licensing and has way-too-liberal rights to reuse your content. (Though according to this post it’s possible to use creative commons with YouTube, though this hasn’t been made public?) More specifically, as argued in a boing boing article - which has now been deleted?¹ - by Xeni Jardin, the intentions of how YT may use uploaded content is questionable.

Is Facebook Evil? privacy leaks, data flows and conspiracy theories

Should we care about privacy? Much privacy talk can come across as anachronistic bourgeois individualism, seemingly getting in the way of what social networking is all about: the flow of information - sharing and multiplying social connections between users.

So when a recent report by Sophos security highlighted that facebook’s privacy practices remain suspect, both in terms of its default settings and common member behaviour, will it affect the average fb member?

Encyclopaedia of Race and Ethnic Studies - Review

Book review of: Ellis Cashmore (ed), Encyclopaedia of Race and Ethnic Studies, London: Routledge, 2004

What are encyclopaedias good for?

In an age of information over-load, the implosion of meanings and forever sliding signifiers, has the imperious authority of such texts been undermined? Or conversely, precisely because of our amnesiac contemporary culture caught in a perpetual presentism - particularly in relation to failing to grasp the contortions of ‘race’ – is the role of such an encyclopaedia needed more than ever?

Cashmore’s legitimacy and scope of his expanded text is made explicitly clear in the introduction: the 4th Edition has now matured from a dictionary to a full-blown encyclopaedic status. The sheer size of the volume is impressive, and with a list over eighty international contributors, he has laudably edited an array of substantial entries which extend the boundaries of ‘race’ work towards an interdisciplinary agenda. Entries such as ‘Mike Tyson’, ‘Central Park Jogger’ and ‘Consumption’ are unlikely to appear in conventionally narrow sociological dictionaries of ‘race’ and ethnicity.

Telling Stories about Bhangra: A Short Review of the Soho Road to the Punjab Exhibition

Some notes based on a talk I gave at the Bhangra Symposium, School of African and Oriental Studies, 15 Sept 2007:

I’m interested in how we can tell the story of Bhangra. The majority of accounts about South Asian life in Britain have been invariably reductive: either an immigrant story of doing ’shit work’/racism or a predictable tale of community/exotic celebration

Art and Police - new issue of transversal web journal

art and police — http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/1007

“The relationship between art practices and the state apparatuses of the police and judiciary has always been a tense one. In the criminalization of activist artists of the Critical Art Ensemble and the PublixTheatreCaravan, in the growing number of cases of the censorship and legal prosecution of artists and curators in the post-communist region, or in the application of terrorism paragraphs to critical scholarship as in the recent case of the Berlin sociologist Andrej Holm, there are more and more indications of an exacerbation of this relationship. Instead of seeing this new quality purely as a means of social subjugation, this issue of transversal seeks to grasp these phenomena in an expanded concept of policing (especially in a confrontation with the relevant theorems of Foucault and Rancière).”

Text from the translate mailing-list http://www.eipcp.net

Edward Said - Orientalism Videos

A useful four-part video collection on Edward Said’s profound work of Orientalism

Part 1/4

Anti-racist/non-Eurocentric Critical Pedagogy - some provocations

Below are some notes (a handout) for the talk I gave at the Migrating University event at Goldsmiths, 14 June 2007:

• Critical pedagogies attempt to distinguish the method (how we teach) from the content (what we teach)…”we teach students how to critically think, not what to think”. But can we really hold on to such a distinction?

Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad

Review of Tejaswini Niranjana (2006) Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad. London: Duke University Press.

This book rethinks diaspora and global modernities in the very considerations of the formation of Indo-Trinidadian music and identity. Tejaswini Niranjana’s wager is to

…contribute to the development of alternative frames of reference, so that Western modernity is no longer seen as the sole point of legitimization or comparison (Niranjana 2006, p.13)