Fitzgerald Steele

Usability, User Experience, Social Media, Web Design and Development…

Playing with Pinax

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I’ve had fun this afternoon playing with Pinax, and new social media framework based on Django.  I got it up and running very quickly, and with very little configuration (changing template files here and there, styles, etc) I’ve got a brand new website for my research lab that features user profiles, project sites complete with wikis and task assignment, social bookmarking, discussion boards, and a host of other features. I showed it to a couple of my labmates.  They were able to log in and get up and running without any prompting for me, so it seems to have a familiar and easy-to-use-and-learn interface.  Those that were running their own projects enjoyed the project interface, and the ability to link and follow activities of different team members.

I think James and the rest of the Pinax team have hit the nail right on the head.  Out of the box I get about 90% of the functionality I was considering building for our lab.  I’d like to create and and in a django-references app, which would store citation information, who’s read what, who’s written what, etc.

I’m looking forward to seeing how much functionality I can add in how much time.  This type of thing could really transform scholarly communication:)

Written by fitzgeraldsteele

October 10, 2008 at 3:55 pm

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