Just to keep you all well bored, here is where my search for a Wiki/Blog/CMS is now taking me. (I'm not really trying to be boring, comments, suggestions and such would be very welcome)
I *think* what I'm basically after is an easy to use (i.e. easy to enter text) web page creation system which is somewhere between a blog and a wiki. The fly in the ointment is that I want to be able to put 'events' into the text somehow and I can't find any Wiki/Blog/CMS that really seems to be able to do this. Oh, I also want to be able to handle a hierarchy of pages.
So, to try and give an example of what I want to do, bring out the old boat buying 'project'. This will have chunks of information (i.e. web pages) laid out as follows:-
Boat purchase Searching for boat Types of boat Insurance Engineer survey ... ...
Then the page about Insurance would basically be a sort of blog:-
28-Dec-2009 Asked for a quote from DBA insurers
05-Jan-2009 DBA quoted £387, seems reasonable
12-Jan-2010 Asked for quote at the Boat Show
... bla ... bla
<EVENT> 01-Apr-2010 - boat insurance required
I want that <EVENT> entry to somehow be a link to a calendar application of some sort which will actually have the event set up so I get a reminder or, even better, I want the blog/wiki to know that <EVENT> means it's got to remind me.
My existing web info management system (cobbled together by me using reStructuredText and a small python script to automatically run it when .rst pages are browsed) does quite a bit of what I want. It provides a hierarchical set of web pages with 'crumb' links and (very) easy creation and editing using reStructuredText. However it doesn't really have any bloglike time/sequence awareness and neither does it have any ability to embed alarms/events.
It may be that I could add what I need to my existing system but it feels like someone somewhere should surely have something like this already.
It looks like TextPattern *might* provide quite a bit of what I want, I may install it and have a play.
Maybe you could try Drupal, we run a couple of Drupal sites although I have little to do with them this seems like a medial task if you know how to use Drupal. Sorry I can't be any more helpful than that but check out the forum on the website, post you problem there and I bet someone will post back saying "Oh yeah just install 'this' Drupal module and your done".
I *think* I have found what I want for my blog/journal/diary event management.
I decided that some sort of blogging software was possible what I wanted so I looked at a few and decided to have a serious play with WordPress, I actually already have a WordPress installation running which my daughter used for her round the world trip a year or so ago but I hadn't done more than install a basic system.
So, I've installed a new WordPress on my home server. I've chosen a Theme (like a skin) that I like which is fairly minimalist. This gives a reasonable look with the information being the important bit. WordPress has 'Categories' which do part of what I want rather well, I can post notes about, for example, insurance in the main thread of the blog and then, if I select category 'insurance' I see the sequence of notes about insurance.
However the real big plus is that WordPress has two or three plugins which implement event calendars where a blog posting is *also* an event which is inserted into an ical calendar. I haven't chosen which one to use yet but the presence of more than one is encouraging. It's as close to perfect as I could want really! :-)
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Chris G -
James Bensley