Google is not my friend today, so I turn to the wise members of the Dope.
I am involved in plans for setting up a website for a new project. The project will disappear in 5-15 years, but they want the project’s momentum (specifically ideas, resources, organizational networks, etc.) to live on within other partners (universities, research organizations, government offices, etc.). In part because of that, and in part because they want to keep costs down, they see the website as a simple Wordpress affair, and are tossing around phrases like “distributed network, not a hub” and saying “we should have a decentralized platform.”
So what exactly, in website development terms, is a “decentralized platform” and why is it better than a “centralized platform”? What are the implications of using one over the other?
It sounds like they’re saying “we want a network we don’t have to maintain ourselves”.
Yeah, good luck with that. A website used by multiple agencies that no one is in charge of (read: pays staff time for maintaining)? You might as well just comment on each other’s Facebooks and hope you can still find the posts 15 years later.
An unmaintained Wordpress site might survive half a year in the wild if you’re lucky before malware gets to it. 5 years is an eternity in web services and by then your decentralized, low-cost, not-a-hub website will be as useful as an abandoned Usenet group. Probably even less than that, because at least Usenet has servers that sometimes archives things.
Wow, “fast” in Doperland is fast indeed. Thanks guys.
To clarify, it isn’t exactly that they won’t maintain it over the life of the project. There will be a communications officer in charge and (at least as the original staffing was envisioned) and she will have a second-in-command who is responsible for taking care of the website. But, it is not seen as a highly technical role; more in terms of updating and adding to content.
Interesting that you mention malware, Reply. I’ve been involved with 2 previous project websites here in Indonesia and both have had pesky intrusions of hacking that we’ve needed technical help to deal with - nothing super serious, but in one case that message about “this site is infected, do you really want to open it” would come up, and in the other, some hacker got in and changed a bit of the text (in more of a “hey look at me hack” than a malicious way).
With a Wordpress site, are we particularly vulnerable? I mean, a DIY Wordpress site? (I’m sure if we use Wordpress but hire the experts to help us, we can ensure better security).
Security is one portion of it, and yes, DIY Wordpress is subject to frequent malware attacks without consistent updates. Managed Wordpress is less vulnerable and you should definitely go that route if your staff’s technical expertise will be limited. That, however, might limit your choice of plugins (which themselves are always a security vs features vs usability compromise).
The other thing is just simply usability, especially long-term. A Wordpress blog permits limited interaction, namely in the forms of sharing and commenting. I don’t know what your project is, but that isn’t always enough to create a community. A website that isn’t tailored to the needs of its community, especially a multi-agency one, is one that users will be reluctant to use – especially if they need to create a separate account for each website in your decentralized non-hub. That just sounds a nightmare ALREADY, much in less 5 years when user interfaces and web services will have evolved dramatically.
But as tellyworth said, some clarification is needed.
Perhaps they read something about the Cloud, and envisage the WordPress framework hanging on multiple servers, with services provided by CloudFlare and media provided by an Amazon AWS bucket and comments managed by Disqus etc. etc.; I can’t really comment ( printably ) on such contrivances since they run counter to my centralising, single-point-of-failure preferences.
Nor have I any confidence in those companies in those fields.
Dunno: I run an out-of-date WP, with mainly up-to-date plugins ( updating Mozilla Persona Browser ID — don’t ask — instantly gave me blank admin pages a day or so ago ); that I have barely added to in two years — and no malware ensues. I cannot start to list all the security tricks used because I’ve forgotten most ( rather like forgetting the about:config tricks needed to make Firefox what it was rather than what they think you should want, it can’t be duplicated ) but they keep it locked down.
First guess:
Sounds to me all they mean is “decentralised” (Their word) ACCESS …
Which means multiple access. or hierarchical security …
In short… They want different parts to be updated by different people…
Second Guess:
Platform REALLY refers to the web server, the operating system, the hardware.
When you decentralise the servers, you can run copies on different servers, eg backups, or clones. You might want “platform INDEPENDENCE” for that, but maybe not ? you could make it the same platform. Maybe it could be that you run multiple servers, do it yourself redundancy, etc, to keep costs down.
