Design Features for the Social Web: The Architecture of Deme

We characterize the "social Web" and argue for several features that are desirable for users of socially oriented web applications. We describe the architec- ture of Deme, a web content management system (WCMS) and extensible frame- work, and show how it implements these desired features. We then compare Deme on our desiderata with other web technologies: traditional HTML, previous open source WCMSs (illustrated by Drupal), commercial Web 2.0 applications, and open-source, object-oriented web application frameworks. The analysis suggests that a WCMS can be well suited to building social websites if it makes more of the features of object-oriented programming, such as polymorphism, and class inheri- tance, available to nonprogrammers in an accessible vocabulary.