Rationale
The role of Tumblr
The idea to use Tumblr for the entirety of the project was considered and investigated (and passionately debated).
The basic description of the proposed solution: -Utilize Tumblr’s out of the box CMS functionality -Lecture notes would be entered as blog posts tagged as “lecture”, assignments as “assignment”, examples as “example”, bog posts as “blog” etc -Menus would be populated according to the post tags using javascript to parse the RSS feed.
The case for: -easily accomplishes all of the CMS-type requirements in the questionnaire (eg non-ftp updates, timed release of content, etc) -free to use -entire team is experienced with customizing templates
The case against: -impossible to be HTML5 compliant. The project documents clearly state that this is required and the team decided that the website of a class that teaches web standards should comply with them. -division of labour is difficult when working on a tumblr template -Tumblr is potentially unreliable. During the investigation, the account was locked out on 3 occassions due to “suspicious activities” (frequent template updates with javascript). In the past few years, many powerful tumblr features have been changed or locked out from new user’s account. There is no guarantee that future tumblr updates won’t break our customizations.
The result: Due to these considerations, it was decided that Tumblr was not the right platform to host the comp-1950 website.