Me thinking out load on technical issues of new site

This is not strictly a contribution in any technical way but just to point out another perspective.

Great post IMO. Too easy to get caught up in the tech and then totally miss the point.

To a degree I must agree with the 'if it aint broken dont fix it' POV. However I think the important factor is ongoing development. This site needs to be more than a BBS. To acheive that there should be a set of standards in place, encompassing technology, graphical design, content, access policy etc and more importantly the will be everyone to see it through.

One of those standards sould be development language. There is no doubt that Java is a leading industry standard. I would totally agree with Bart that Java is the way to go. (Unless of course Bart installs IIS, .net, frontpage extensions, MS SQL and Sharepoint) Only Kidding of course

OK, cheers for the contriblutions guys. I'm deligheted to see that we all agree on what the requirements are so I'll just elaborate a bit on my concerns:

1) We need a unified user management system that all aspects of the site can authenticate off. This is the massive barrier to just grabbing a load of off the shelf things and trying to beat them together into a unified whole. Things that don't need to authenticate users can be easily taken off the shelf, things that do can't. User management is what I still really worry about. ATM we authenticate everything off the Bulletin BBS and I'm just not sure that's the right way to go. I have not yet made decisions on this and am going to look into some other portal technologies before I do.

2) Separation of content from markup is one of the things that really concerns me. To me the total separation of these two things is vital to making the content entered "future proof". Off the shelf CMS systems are often very poor at this, hence my reluctance to go that route when TinyCME front ends are quite quick to build and result in the content being available in XHTML strickt while still being really easy to generate for the users.

Anyhow, I'm really happy with the way this thread has panned out, I wasn't sure if there was much point to doing a "brain dump" to the boards on what is going through my mind ATM but I think it's worked out brilliantly.

2) Separation of content from markup is one of the things that really concerns me. To me the total separation of these two things is vital to making the content entered "future proof". Off the shelf CMS systems are often very poor at this, hence my reluctance to go that route when TinyCME front ends are quite quick to build and result in the content being available in XHTML strickt while still being really easy to generate for the users.

Or put another way users wanting to contribute content should not need to worry about XHTML or anything else. I should be able to use text, or write something int a content editor provided, or (perhaps) the CMS should be able to understand opendoc so I can just upload a staroffice doc. [and convert all into xhtml or somesuch]

FYI ... split off Micheal's "big picture" post into a thread of it's own.