How to Select an Open Source Publishing Platform – Step 3: Determine Your Capacity for Internal Design

A couple weeks ago we took a look at some of the first steps to take when selecting an open source publishing platform. From starting off with doing some guerilla market research and viewing source code to figure out what tools others are using, moving on to trying to gauge your internal capacity for carrying out the web development work required to set up and extend your installation, the next step we’re going to cover is how to assess your internal capacity to carry out the design work needed to create the web user experience you’re looking for out of your open source site.

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How to Select an Open Source Publishing Platform – Step 2: Determine Your Capacity for Internal Development Work

In the last post on selecting an open source publishing platform we offered a pretty simple tip to help you get started: take a look at the source code of other sites in your field and see what tools they’re using. Once you’ve figured that part out, the next step is to determine whether you have what it takes to roll out an installation of the tool yourself. What extra plugins or modules are required for the full feature-set you’re looking for? How active is the community in using those particular plugins and modules? How confident are you that you can maintain these in the future, particularly once your site is up live?

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How to Select an Open Source Publishing Platform – Step 1: Research Your Market

Over the last few years, open source web applications have gained real traction on the web. From individuals to small businesses, non-profit organizations to public institutions and large corporate agencies, all across the board a growing number of websites are using open source technologies to turn the gears.

But what works for one, won’t work for all, and quite often the sucess of your site may depend on that very first decision you make in selecting one tool over another. So how do you choose which tool(s) to use?

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