Russell and Associates - Forum

Been testing multiple PHP CMS systems these past weeks.  Joomla, WordPress, Mambo, MediaWiki, and Concrete5.  They are all capable systems, they all have their quirks, and have performance issues on my development system.

This dev system is an AMD Duron 1.8 GHz with 512MB of RAM  running Fedora Core 9 with the LAMP stack, and Apache  Tomcat5 Java app server.

The one interesting difference is the administrator modules.  Adding content is a breeze in Mambo, with granular control over most content attributes.

• MediaWiki: This is the software that powers Wikipedia. It is powerful, extensible, and is what it claims to be – a wiki engine.   I guess it could be a CMS, but I am debating using this for general site management functionality with so many more powerful CMS platforms to choose from.
• Pros: A very powerful wiki platform that runs on any platform that supports MySQL and PHP.
• Cons: Having to edit the .php file that contains constants to result in changes to the pages.

Experienced Nube Error

Yesterday, I was asked by my father to look at his scanner to printer connection.  He has a Visioneer 6000 scanner connected through his PC to an laser printer.  The button on the scanner that allowed him to perform a “Copy” of a document no longer worked.

After spending about 40 minutes checking settings, config files, insuring that the DLL’s needed were present, rebooting the computer a couple of times (Windows XP SP 2) and reading the sparse manual provided by Visioneer, I decided to go back to basics.  I turned the printer off then back on – magic!  Everything worked as it should. The printer had not been cycled for months – causing some handshake/comm error.

Lesson: Cycle hardware, check all input/output cables, before delving into a software error – no matter how much we know, the basics of troubleshooting should be followed to save time and effort.

Have a great week!