I’ve read the tea-leaves and it’s pretty clear to me that Apple has quietly abandoned its iWeb software. Okay. That’s fair; I pretty much abandoned it a long time ago, myself. Whenever I have to make changes to the church web site, I always cringe because it means I have to crank up iWeb and figure out again how it works.

So. That leaves me with the dilemma of how to replace it. On the one hand is the static website. I could throw one of those together using webgen. Perhaps with a few hand-coded extensions using erubis, haml, sass, and a smattering of kramdown.

The problems with that approach are that it would (a) take me forever to get right, especially if I made the error of using semantic markup instead of tables. Not to mention (b) inserting me into every part of the workflow, insuring nobody else could ever take over as webmaster.

Then, on the other hand, there’s a full-fledged CMS like Drupal or Joomla. The price is right, and other people have already done most of the work. I see that plenty of churches have gone this route.

The problem with a CMS is that–wow!–it’s not like setting up a WordPress blog. It’s more like setting up a couple of dozen…or maybe a few hundred. It’s like landing a jet on the Hudson River, or charting out the chronology of the End Times: I know there are people who do that, but I’m not sure I could ever be one of them.