The guys who make it didn’t have to do it that way. Remember TikiWiki? Silly damn question, of course you do. And a large part of why it was so damned awful was that they took the opposite approach, made it a closed system almost entirely dependent on their plugins and very difficult to customize. I was impressed by their library of plugins but didn’t consider customizability enough. And me a geek.

Years ago I was skeptical of the concept of open-source software, but WP’s an example of a successful split-level approach that melds the idealism and fuzzy math (almost like karma, it’ll “pay off someday”) with straightforward business: wordpress.com, home of your blog, where they apply their own open-source software, and derive revenue from advertising and premium services…which pays them to continue to develop open-source WordPress. Smart guys, to have invented a perpetual-motion machine like that.

One runs on the usual free WordPress site for my blog, and the other runs on GoDaddy for my book’s website.

It takes some work to get the features I like on both. I needed a plugin on Jetpack to give one the features that came with the other.

For the life of me I can’t remember without checking which version is .org and which is .com.

I am quite proud of myself that I’ve turned out a reasonable product in both cases without having to touch code with my bare hands.

You’re familiar with wordpress.com, and it’s an instructive example. The open-source WordPress you can download from wordpress.org is meant to power only one blog, with posting by one or a few people. It can’t possibly power wordpress.com, with its millions of blogs; yet wordpress.com really is WordPress the open source software. What bridges the gap between them is a theme, too, one that, like Proscenium, virtualizes WordPress into any arbitrarily large number of blogs (“nodes” in Proscenium terminology).

Ever heard of a MOOC? It’s a “massively open online course”, and recent examples from MIT and Stanford enrolled upwards of 140,000 students. I was asked this week if Proscenium could power something that size, and I could answer that it can, by bringing more cloud servers online. I designed it to scale.

Like I said, the HabitableZone doesn’t use all of Proscenium’s features.

Look at this page: It has an “arch” across the top–the header; it has an orchestra pit in the footer. The columns on each side correspond to stage left and stage right. And the central large arena is the stage.

proscenium: noun – A Web page design paradigm so universal that nobody notices it.

Tom’s right that “Proscenium” as used here is my project. The Proscenium software started out as a user interface for the WordPress blogging software, so named because it produces this proscenium-shaped page layout. From that tiny acorn grew a mighty tail that wags the WordPress dog: Powering the Zone is just a hobby, in its day job Proscenium is running an online educational “platform” delivering dozens of courses to thousands of students. The Zone uses only a fraction of its features.

That’s one mystery solved.