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NASA Launches New Science Website

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the nasa-trying-to-catch-up dept.

aclark4life writes "NASA just launched a new website designed to provide information about its scientific endeavors and achievements. The new site was built on top of the Plone Open Source Content Management System and features an easy-to-navigate design and several new search features."

9 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Slow news day? by FoolsGold · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Slashdot doesn't give a crap about new websites. The ONLY reason it's mentioned here is because the backbone of the site is Open Source. Apparently that's important enough.

  2. No RSS feeds on the whole site by theurge14 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    No RSS feeds on the site. Does the 'Plone Open Source Content Management System' not feature RSS or did NASA decide to disable it?

    1. Re:No RSS feeds on the whole site by tvaught · · Score: 2, Informative

      Plone absolutely supports rss throughout (and has since the very early versions)...must have been disabled.

    2. Re:No RSS feeds on the whole site by Laughing+Dog · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Plone has RSS support; NASA probably just didn't wish to have feeds. There's a decent, if biased summary of what some of Plone's high points are here. The CMS itself isn't geared towards any specific category of content; some organizations use it for their public website, whereas we use it to power a small Intranet web site where I work, primarily for the purpose of sharing documents rather than typical web content. It has relatively fine-grained security options built in regarding who can see what, and the Kupu editor is *extremely* easy to use for people who know nothing about markup languages, but who can at least use a word processor. The default site skin presents a very intuitive interface. The ability to manage documents in a workflow is helpful, too. For me, the biggest downside to Plone has been the shear amount of conflicting documentation on the product. For a sortable table, documents for slightly older versions will say to mark it as a certain class (and different versions say different classes), and let Plone do the work. Newer documentation points the user to JQuery. A lot what works well with the current version seems to be located off the main Plone site; there are a lot of articles on the official project site itself that are our of date, and, since that's where a newbie is going to go first, it can be an exercise in frustration. Most of what applied to older versions still works on the current one, but, when it doesn't, sometimes reading the conflicting recommendations and averaging them is the best way to go. Overall, though, it suits our needs well.

  3. Re:Nasa 'Launches' by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2, Funny

    Well, the load on their web servers is definitely going to skyrocket now. Let's hope that their machines have stellar performance!

    --
    Ezekiel 23:20
  4. Not designed for Firefox, eh? by SockPuppet_9_5 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Love the little pop up text box on all the vocabulary words, but they pop under the picture menu, hiding 3/4 of the text.

  5. Re:Nasa 'Launches' by plover · · Score: 2, Funny
    For those astronomical price tags, they'd better have.

    But what do I know? I'm no rocket scientist.

    --
    John
  6. Nerds don't like science? by interactive_civilian · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Slashdot doesn't give a crap about new websites. The ONLY reason it's mentioned here is because the backbone of the site is Open Source. Apparently that's important enough. Yeah! Ignore that fact the site is all about earth and space science. You know, because everyone at Slashodot has equal levels of knowledge of such things and any site such as this which is meant to further the education of those who don't have that level of knowledge is useless. Yup, definitely not "news for nerds, stuff that matters."

    How about you get off your high horses? I'm a teacher teaching the equivalent of 8th grade science and 10th, 11th, and 12th grade biology in Thailand, and I'm glad that this got posted to slashdot or I might have missed it. There is a lot of cool information on that site, and I can see myself using it this year with my science classes. Kudos to Slashdot for bringing it to my attention.

    Sorry, but we can't all be genius rocket scientists / earth scientists like the PP and GPP.

    --
    "Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
  7. Plone for CMS and for deployment by Wheat · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Looks like they are using Plone as a CMS as well as for deployment, since good ol' /ZopeTime works :P

    http://nasascience.nasa.gov/ZopeTime