Design Features for the Social Web: The Architecture of Deme
This work addresses the need for better tools for developers and users of social web applications, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing WCMS and object-oriented concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of designing web content management systems (WCMS) for social web applications by proposing desirable features and implementing them in Deme, showing that a WCMS can effectively build social websites by making object-oriented programming features accessible to non-programmers.
We characterize the "social Web" and argue for several features that are desirable for users of socially oriented web applications. We describe the architecture of Deme, a web content management system (WCMS) and extensible framework, and show how it implements these desired features. We then compare Deme on our desiderata with other web technologies: traditional HTML, previous open source WCMSs (illustrated by Drupal), commercial Web 2.0 applications, and open-source, object-oriented web application frameworks. The analysis suggests that a WCMS can be well suited to building social websites if it makes more of the features of object-oriented programming, such as polymorphism, and class inheritance, available to non-programmers in an accessible vocabulary.