I feel inspired to use this site to pull myself together after more than 10 years of gradual disillusionment of manning websites (MC and non-MC), beginning with free sites, later migrating to institutional (still free) servers which somehow had a shelf-life, and now, with a dot com and paying for server space I need to upgrade myself to php from the htm/htmls that I'm so used to - yes sir I need help (most probably time) here.
On a more general note, I'm pressed to provide some form of a continuity in the communication with other MCOBs, especially when emails get to be very choppy.
Camus's 9th Blog has inspired me to locate my umpteenth blog on the net and first one here by putting the following down:
anuar yusof wrote:
Assalmualaikom Sdr. POPe (WB) dan Zion Dahari ZA et al;
Adalah amat menarik hati apabila kita/saya, Mcobs lainnya dapat mendengar pendapat, membaca, meluaskan pandangan(horizon) kita mengenai Addeen kita.
Oleh itu dapatlah Sdr. Pope 69 (WB) terangkan sedikit sebanyak mengenai ayat ayat yang telah disebutkan didalam e mail terdahulu spt:-
a) Takwa - Konteks masakini.
b) Iman - konteks masyarakat majmuk.
c) Syaariat - Maksud Syaariat (sperti Menjamin Aqidah dsb)
d) Seperti yang diajukan Junjungan Rasullullah SAW - "Man Roa Mungkaran..."
e) Sebagaimana kita maklum - Tugas Utama Nabi SAW di Madinah -
1. Membina Masjid (segala pusat harakiah Islamiah)'
2. Daulah Islamiah - Mendirikan Negara Islam Berpelembagaan Madinah Yang Pertama (jarang jarang Para Ilmuan Islam sendiri Komen !!!)
f) Memadaaikah kita setelah Beriman - Tetapi tidak Allah Uji (Ayat AlQur'an)
g) Apa tafsir saudara - "aazab bi la shadid", Aazab un Aazim "- jarang disentuh!
h) Bagaimana dengan... Ya Ai Yuhallazi Na' aamanu , Wa ,aamilus solihin?! (dari segi aamali hari hariannya)!
i) Ada orang yang beranggapan :apa yang berlaku pada ummat (Islam) sekeliling bukan urusan dia? Bagaimana "Ummatan Wahidah " / Ummatan Wasato"?
j) Didalam Khutbah Jumaat selalu dibacakan " Orang orang yang mengasingkan dirinya dari Jamaah... Allah akan asingkan dirinya dalam Neraka "???
Sila lah sedikit sebanyak Sdr. Pope 69 datangkan jawapan untuk renungan / telitian bersama!
hamba allah @ amy @ KK @ 28/12/2005 - hamba allah yang Fakir, Dzaif, lagi Jahil!
Answered via email was a) and b) but I'll try to locate them again here where I shall also work on the rest of it, piece by piece (94:7-8), insyaAllah. POPe
Feeling Inspired
POPe69,
Glad that you're inspired. Do give us a holler whenever you need any pointers (on website mastering, that is). We'll talk php, css, XML, Ruby, Rails and Ajax. :)
We have on this site a tool to publish online books where major and minor topics could be arranged accordingly. Based on the outline that you've presented, it seems that the book tool would come in handy. You could continue to post each title as a blog post first, and we could organize them later into an online book which would be a great source of reference.
Thank you for sharing your wisdom.
Help With Website Mastering
Alhamdulillah, thanks Camus for the offer. For a start, I'm familiarizing myself w Plesk (v3.5) which is the standard control panel from the web host. Plesk has an application vault into which I've downloaded Mambo which I'm trying my hands on because of its content management possibilities (site not on air yet though). At the same time I've looked at Moodle which may serve my teaching-learning purposes but seems heavy for the more general user. I am looking for something interactive but light enough for users, editors, administrators. And now I'm trying to blog on Drupal which u've indicated other possibilities which sounds interesting but too big for me to chew for the moment. I'll blog here anyway, to continue what I started off with, hoping that I can see what it does before getting stuck on an open platform. Any suggestion for newbies on choosing a practical, robust, ok application? Again thanks for your response & support.
Content Management System (CMS)
Dear POPe,
www.mcoba.org is running on Joomla, which is a branch of Mambo. But I find it neither as powerful nor as flexible as Drupal, which is currently being used for this Offside.
I would highly recommend Drupal for its flexibility. As such we are looking to move the two Joomla sites that we have (www.mcoba.org and www.milesacademy.com) into Drupal. It does have its shares of bugs and issues, but I believe there is no tool which is perfect, and the question should always be, "what is perfect for you?"
The up and coming tool which is good to keep an eye for is Railfrog. It is designed with Web 2.0 in mind. It is still very, very early in its development and won't be available for release anytime soon, but I believe it would be the way of the future.
Sukardi '87 is getting his feet wet in Drupal too. I'm hoping he would pop by here for a discussion.
Living the THIRD WAVE
I am extremely delighted to observe that a number of activities hv kept this site busy. Welcome Bro Wan PopE and Rosli Ali and I do hope that many more mcobs will join us to make this site the EFFECTIVE platform for us to communicate and interact.
So my message to members of E-groupies and Webmasters (aku panggil depa ni JEDI Master); methink KITA KENA BUAT CLASS KAT MCOBA SO THAT MEMBERS CAN KNOW HOW TO USE THIS SITE. TO DO THIS, WE MUST HV THE PEOPLE TO BE PART OF A "SUPPORT NETWORK" THAT CAN DIRECTLY FOLLOW-UP ON "NEW IT STUDENTS". (I hv spoken abt this to Ja'a several months ago i.e. creating the support network). And Camus, there was a query by Doc Hanis re: membership to this site, can you pls response OR perhaps Bro Zaim can assist our Doc on how to get into perspective and get the best out of this site? Note:- I wanted to explain it to him verbally over the weekend but he could not make it to our gathering.
There must be a "collective" push from IT savvy mcobs to bring the rest into this THIRD WAVE. I hope we can accomplish this "mission" together.
Answer to Doc's Question
Zin,
I've answered Doc's question concerning members privacy in MCOBA-Malaysia. The gist of the answer is:
We could create a group called 'Old Boys Only' and assign multiple group admins from each batch to invite their batch members into the group. Any postings which we would like to keep private should be checked 'Old Boys Only' and thus the access to those postings and subsequent comments will only be allowed to invited subscribers.
Drupal, Wordpress, MovableType, PHPNuke
Camus Bro, am currently doing my own evaluation on the above for soon to be revealed 8185ers.com, the official site for class of 85. Seeking your opinion and comparison, being an expert in all these. So far, I have tried WP and MT, and found them to be ok for someone like me who knows very little abt PHP and XMS programming. PHPNuke requires a bit more knowledge on programming, so it's out.
Err... would you consider providing some free consultation untuk site abang-abang ni? Well, B*bis are cheapos...
Drupal it should be ...
Hi Radin (my form 3 senior in Dorm 4 New Hostel 1983 :) ),
In my humble opinion, for what you want to do (i.e. manage a batch or community site) Drupal outclasses many others. Wordpress and MT are geared more towards blogging specifically and thus have very little community features.
There's a bit of a learning curve with Drupal, but it's well worth it. I think I took a whole week toying around with it to fully grasp it's concept.
We used to run phpBB, but I find it rather limited to only discussion forum. But I think it is still the best forum tool out there.
We actually migrated our batch site from phpBB to Drupal, but all the existing users hated Drupal forum because they were so used to phpBB and they were missing some of the things which is not available in Drupal. So, for the forum section, we still keep it separately in phpBB.
But with a new site like yours (and this one), Drupal covers pretty much everything. A scroll of all the Drupal modules available for download provides a glimpse of what the system is capable of.
So for the start, decide what is the objective of your site and list down your requirements. Match it with the available CMS tools available, and make your pick.
If you do choose Drupal, buy me dinner or lunch within a WiFi hotspot, and we'll go over the configuration of the site and some of the basics to help you get over the initial learning curve.
Hope that helps.
BTW, what's B*bis?