Sunday, September 21, 2008

Thoughts about wikis and CMS

I've used to use wikis since around 2000 ; I've always been interested in this technology, even if at first I couldn't say exactly why, maybe the intuition that web sites should be simple to use and simple to design. It is actually, even today, quite painful to define web sites ; there is a multitude of languages, technologies, frameworks, patterns, paradigms, ecosystems, and so on... Everyone tries to enhance a technology and spends time to fight other people to proove that the new technology is the best one.
It is very time consuming, and in fine technologies are still not oriented customers, users.
It is certainly why ideas behind wikis (I don't speak about their implementations) are for me valuable ; the wiki creator thought that it should be easy to create pages, to navigate between them, and so on...
In ten years, other concepts have emerged up, the so-called CMS. The idea behind them is also simplifying published information by providing a predefined frame where putting texts and images...
Obviously this initial precept has been perverted, and many users wanted more and more functionalities and customization facilities... This historical direction is enabled by the use of new technics like the ones found in the web 2.0, ie javascript, Ajax, Flash, ... The result is the emergence of more and more complex CMS (joomla, Drupal, ...) where customization is becoming more and more a programming task without using the words.
Wikis (XWiki, Twiki, Editme, Confluence...) follow the same path ; we want, need always more functionnalities like blog, rss readers, agenda, and so on...
I think we are today to a conjunction point where finally the differences between wikis and CMS are very narrow... But it is still to different worlds for the developpers ;), not for the users. It recalls me in mind engineers in the 80' who used to develop either automatic systems or general purpose application... It was two worlds, and nowadays, both are industrial real time system developpers.
So what is the future? I'm not the pythie, but I don't see how CMS and Wikis could not merge into a same concept which could revolutionize not only the way users may interect with the tools, but also the way developpers have to develop applications... Maybe the LEGO time where everything could be define graphically and interactively is going up.
The work of engineers will have to focus more on specifications, and retrieving information from the customers and make the application match more tightly to their expressed or not needs...
In a certain sense, it is the same way automotive or aerospace industries have encountered by using such tools like Catia or Autocad.

No comments: