Over the past couple weeks it's become obvious that the host
www.scylla.org has some sort of hardware issue and most likely needs to be replaced/have it's work pushed off to another machine. My personal preference is to have it's work pushed off to Achilles with all the other web pages, but there's a few issues with that.
The code that scylla uses,
slashcode, hasn't had a version upgrade since August 2002, and won't run on Apache 2.0 or using mod_perl 1.99. Since those versions of Apache and Mod Perl have been standard in most distros for years, security updates for the older versions aren't forthcoming and many of the dozens of Perl modules that Slash requires to run can't be upgraded without breaking everything. For Scylla that means that I can't move slashcode to another server without a huge headache of compiling an old version of Apache and mod_perl, crippling the other web applications on those machines, and setting myself up for problems every time Perl or certain Perl modules release a security update.
So, I've about had it with Slash, but moving to another system isn't trivial. Converting the database of stories and journals isn't going to be easy, and I don't want to just toss the content in the move to new software.
Of course, the failing hardware is making the need for some sort of move somewhat urgent.
If anyone has any recommendations about what they think would be a good CMS system to replace the slashcode, I'd appreciate it. I prefer PHP, since every PHP web app I've installed so far has been a breeze to set up and maintain, but if there's a decent mod perl suite I'd be willing to look at it. So far I've checked out Drupal, which does everything that Slash does and more, but I'm not sure the interface is intuitive enough. phpNuke and Metadot are two others I've looked at, but they have some shortcomings as well.
