Posted by Bill Haenel on 15-Feb-07

MySpace experiments, and other stuff

I'm going to try something new here at billhaenel.com. As a means for testing some of the more popular community web applications out there, I'll be working on integrating MySpace, Flickr, and just about anything else that comes along, with the CMS that runs this site, MySiteWorx.

Some of you may know already that I developed MySiteWorx several years ago as a solution to that old problem, how to have a blog AND a CMS in the same package. It came on the tail end of development of the SourceForge-hosted Public Media Manager project that I did with North Country Public Radio. It occurred to me that the whole CMS thing was important, but that having a blog was a big deal as well. At the time there were few packages out there that would do both, or at least that would do so very well. How would a person control their site, but also have a running journal? MySiteWorx was my answer, and now we have lots of clients using it to control their websites and get the word out about the products and services. This site is of course MySiteWorx-controlled as well, and now I'm gonna mess with it.

I think the simplest way to do this integration will be to load RSS from MySpace, Flickr, or whatever, and provide links within the admin framework of MySiteWorx that point to the admin areas of those sites. This makes it easy to switch back and forth.

Why would I do this? Why, when MySiteWorx has a built-in gallery manager already, and a built-in blogging engine already, would I think that adding the capability of using some other blog or gallery would be a good idea? Well, people have ideas about what works for them. And many people have blogs and galleries already. In fact, many of them are done with MySpace and Flickr. So we'll take advantage of that fact, while simultaneously opening the door to a more flexible way of using MySiteWorx, one that's not limited to doing what we expect people to do, but rather what they want to do, or what they may already be doing.

Phew! I am the king of the run-on sentence. If you've read this far though, you probably don't care.

Perhaps I will also look at working MySiteWorx in with WordPress or something. This is more of a stretch, as WordPress is pretty much a duplication of MySiteWorx's capabilities. So we'll have to work a bit harder on justification on this one.

MediaWiki will certainly be a good one to integrate as well. Widely used, very useful. Would be interesting to see what will happen with that one, since it's so very flexible and could be a great addition to the family.

We already integrate phpBB and Zencart for more obvious reasons. If I do say so myself, the integration is pretty seamless, and it's a bit of good work watching it in action. If you'd like to see a great example of Zencart integrated with MySiteWorx, check out the Frederic Remington Art Museum's website. We did that one last year, using Zencart as the shopping cart backbone, integrated with MySiteWorx, of course. Two examples of phpBB/MySiteWorx integrations can be found at the North Country Advocacy Group website, and the St. Lawrence County Democratic Committee site. At the time of this writing, neither of those BB's have had a whole lot of traffic, but I expect they will in time.

I will probably start by moving all of my blogging into MySpace for a time, and putting some photos into Flickr. I'll completely discontinue use of MySiteWorx, except to manage the actual site. Then I'll replace all of the functions that are missing as a result with stuff from MySpace and Flickr. Should be interesting.

Onward to MySpace Flickr and MediaWiki then.

• Open Source
• Software
• Internet