Comment to 'It takes a village to build a mind.'
  • Thank you, Martin-sso 

    There are many good ideas and suggestions in your post. You are most welcome to post them one by one as issues to our GitHub repo and we'll assess to schedule the approved ones for development.

    In regards to some of the comparisons with WP... As you can see in most cases the way WP handles modifications is through plugins. This is possible in the same manner is UNA - one can write a module which would add a block to multiple pages, or an SEO module, or even a UI for direct editing for pages. WP has the advantage of being very well funded and widely popular - so there are quite simply a lot of modules available for it. This, however, may be a problem as well - core site features that heavily reply on 3rd party modules make the platform susceptible to dependency issues and make it difficult for webmasters to access support. If, say, one day for some reason half of the site pages return a "strange" error - who is supposed to help the webmaster? There may be 10 different uncoordinated companies that produced modules those pages depend on. Same can happen with UNA, but at least we try to produce most of the core modules in-house, so that if you have to deactivate 3rd-party modules the site is still functional.

    That is not to say that I don't support WP. On the contrary - I believe that Automatic is doing a great job and I have big respect for Matt and his team. I have communicated years ago and my impression was that he really has the best intentions and solid vision. 

    The way I see the difference is that WP is more like Unix - it's a stable, solid core, but if you want to put together a sophisticated OS, you'd have to be prepared to deal with lots of tricky components. UNA is being built to be more like MacOS - a more "vertical" system with a number of usable apps available out-of-the-box, and a more controlled apps market. 

    Also, in terms of the platform structure - UNA is more like Drupal and less like WP. More of a framework than a CMS. 

    In Drupal, all content is presented as "nodes" where some nodes can reference other nodes as parents. The went quite hardcore on this in Drupal 8 and everything is node now. Only "comments" are notes nodes - they're attached to nodes.

    UNA is similar - we have "pages", which can be presented in different "views" - and you control all those views in the Studio. Plus, since UNA is a community-management-system, we have "objects" that attach to pages - comments (like in Drupal), reactions, attachments, votes, etc.

    Such structure in both Drupal and in UNA allows for the creation of new content types. This is why we can create new types of modules relatively quickly - blogs, discussions, albums, etc. 

    Another big benefit in UNA is the "context" modules - containers for content if you will. These are profiles, groups, events, spaces, etc. You can make something similar in Drupal by creating module with parent-type nodes, but it would be a lot of work - you'd be building a CMS basically. So, in UNA we do this legwork and create most of the basic content and context modules to start you off. 

    This is the difference between WP, Drupal and UNA in a nutshell. I love all three (not equally though 😁).