Building A CMS: Asking For Your Advice
Posted: Sat May 24, 2008 5:54 pm
I'm not pleased with what I've seen so far with CMS packages. Here's the problem. My clients have ideas, they draw them out on paper as wireframes, scan them in, and email them to a designer. He makes the PSD. They then ship it to a chopper who creates the XHTML/DIV/CSS template. I receive the templates and then they ask me, "Make it easy to use where I can publish stuff out there without needing a programmer."
What most of them do not do is review CMS products, find one they like, and then ask me to customize it so that it sort of looks like some idea they had in mind.
So, in my opinion, CMSes go about this in the entirely wrong direction. Things need to be coded completely differently.
I really don't have time to build a CMS, but seeing as I get this request over and over again, and it's not very easy (even as a programmer) to take one's XHTML/DIV/CSS template and make it "fit" inside of Joomla or Drupal's template system, I need something else.
To me, the way it should work is that when I receive an XHTML/DIV/CSS template, I just rip out the Lorum Ipsum text and replace it with gadgets from the CMS. Some are canned, and some are custom. In my mind, the custom ones can be built painlessly and even have an integrated control panel that matches the theme of the admin system.
The gadgets are inserted into one's template by replacing Lorum Ipsum with something like:
<cms:articles section="About Town" subsection="Recent Events" />
or
<cms:section-menu count="4" />
or
<cms:custom title="Today's Poll" name="Poll1" href="gadgets/poll1.php" />
...and can be styled easily with CSS.
And the admin system should just be a mini-publishing system that lets one create sections, subsections, articles into the subsections (or into a section without a subsection), and let one BBCode the articles with a little toolbar. Nothing too complex.
And for everything else, I can just connect phpBB and build custom gadgets that tie into that. (So, if you want to comment on an article, one can tie in the hyperlink to the article in the forum.) (Note that I'm thinking of this CMS being a front-end for phpBB. If one wants WordPress and a blog-like atmosphere, then they should go with that as their "CMS" of sorts instead.)
So, anyway, if you think this vision is on track, and you like the 80/20 rule and the KISS principle, but yet like something elegant (not quite Joomla's Admin system, but close), then please give me your opinion on what you'd like to see in this thing.
Oh, and yes, if I build it, I'll give it away for free on a Creative Commons license and let people fork it until it becomes its own community-managed project.
What most of them do not do is review CMS products, find one they like, and then ask me to customize it so that it sort of looks like some idea they had in mind.
So, in my opinion, CMSes go about this in the entirely wrong direction. Things need to be coded completely differently.
I really don't have time to build a CMS, but seeing as I get this request over and over again, and it's not very easy (even as a programmer) to take one's XHTML/DIV/CSS template and make it "fit" inside of Joomla or Drupal's template system, I need something else.
To me, the way it should work is that when I receive an XHTML/DIV/CSS template, I just rip out the Lorum Ipsum text and replace it with gadgets from the CMS. Some are canned, and some are custom. In my mind, the custom ones can be built painlessly and even have an integrated control panel that matches the theme of the admin system.
The gadgets are inserted into one's template by replacing Lorum Ipsum with something like:
<cms:articles section="About Town" subsection="Recent Events" />
or
<cms:section-menu count="4" />
or
<cms:custom title="Today's Poll" name="Poll1" href="gadgets/poll1.php" />
...and can be styled easily with CSS.
And the admin system should just be a mini-publishing system that lets one create sections, subsections, articles into the subsections (or into a section without a subsection), and let one BBCode the articles with a little toolbar. Nothing too complex.
And for everything else, I can just connect phpBB and build custom gadgets that tie into that. (So, if you want to comment on an article, one can tie in the hyperlink to the article in the forum.) (Note that I'm thinking of this CMS being a front-end for phpBB. If one wants WordPress and a blog-like atmosphere, then they should go with that as their "CMS" of sorts instead.)
So, anyway, if you think this vision is on track, and you like the 80/20 rule and the KISS principle, but yet like something elegant (not quite Joomla's Admin system, but close), then please give me your opinion on what you'd like to see in this thing.
Oh, and yes, if I build it, I'll give it away for free on a Creative Commons license and let people fork it until it becomes its own community-managed project.