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.Comment: Appeared in Luis Olsina, Oscar Pastor, Daniel Schwabe, Gustavo Rossi,
and Marco Winckler (Editors), Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop
on Web-Oriented Software Technologies (IWWOST 2009), CEUR Workshop
Proceedings, Volume 493, August 2009, pp. 40-51; 12 pages, 2 figures, 1 tabl