Foundread, a great site for entrepreneurs from the GigaOM crew, has switched to WordPress.com from Public Square. Public Square is a CMS from Cucina Media that most famously powers the information architecture site Boxes and Arrows, which I believe was previously run on Drupal.
I don’t agree with the claim at PublicSquare that their features are “firsts”. A long-standing gripe of yours truly is that “third generation” platforms like WordPress didn’t bring forward “first” or “second” generation features from systems like Usenet or forums like Kuro5hin.org and Slashdot.org.
PublicSquare does look pretty nice though — it’s nice that these features are coming back into the mainstream. But I feel that the good work of previous thinkers and coders sometimes get overlooked in the rush to synergise this and radically paradigm-shift that.
I’d also add that I don’t like hosted apps, no matter how super-duper. Every successful platform of any decent longevity opens its source and allows third-party installations. Every single one. People want control over their installations. Compuserve had features Usenet didn’t; guess which is still around. Various sites tried to recreate the Slashdot experience during the first bubble, all that’s left are the Aeron chairs. No fully-hosted app has lasted out a decade yet.
Time for Public Square to update their front page screen shots.
It’s built on Ruby on Rails. I contacted one of the developers last year this time because I liked the calendar and was interested in it for my day job as at Cit J app.
I was surprised it ended up a hosted solution.
Boxes and Arrows never ran Drupal as far as I know.
However, Drupal’s old default theme was loosely based on Boxes and Arrows old design. For a complete history, see http://lists.drupal.org/archives/development/2006-08/msg00965.html.
Looks like the URL linker here doesn’t know about English punctuation. Here is a link that works:
http://lists.drupal.org/archives/development/2006-08/msg00965.html
Maybe that’s where I got that impression.
I filed a bug for the trailing punctuation thing.