There are several very good content management apps out there, but most of them are limited in their extensibility...you do what the developers want you to do and no more. What they want you to do is fairly robust in some cases, but these are circumstances where the system has been built for a specific type of content, such as a blog. I want my system to be so robust that it handles any type of content that the user throws at it. I want my system to be flexible and easy enough to use so that users can easily specify navigational structures...which could be defined from a list of pages, or perhaps from a set of data. The user should be able to create whatever kind of look and feel they want, and should be able to modify this very easily.
I have developed some very good site specific content management systems, but this system should be site nonspecific, that is a user should be able to install the files and go...specifiy page structure and layout, store some data, etc, and be done.
Time for sleep, perhaps something will come to me.
Posted by Bryan Daneman on 10/21/2001 9:58:33 PM
From this one, to cachedCode (which isn't a project as much as it is a site in need of content), to the redesign of a band's website. On top of it all, I am working on Trinity, the super secret Web Site Content Management System. It is the system that is supposed to combine all of the best things from all of the sites and applications that I have built over the past few years and make it super easy to build, deploy, and maintain dynamic, data-driven web sites and applications.
Instead of spending all my time getting that finished, I spend most of it, tweaking the other sites...adding a feature here, some new functionality there. Then, all of these things must be ported into the Trinity Framework.
What a pain in the ass! So, right now, I am stopping this craziness. No more! From this point forward, what you see on my sites is what you get. I am in head-down hardcore development mode on the Trinity Project, nothing else.
Yeah, right ;-)
Posted by Bryan Daneman on 10/19/2001 2:51:32 PM
Posted by Bryan Daneman on 10/10/2001 9:28:57 PM
I think that developing applications for the web is one of the most fun work type thinks I can think of. It must be true, I mean here I am doing this stuff on my own time, isn't that proof enough?
I could spend hours and hours just surfing the web looking for new, innovative things to learn and implement.
Stay tuned as I keep adding incredible stuff to this place.
Posted by Bryan Daneman on 10/2/2001 10:56:49 PM
On one hand, you could hand code everything. For each web site, you write code that is specialized for only that site. You design a database for use with only the data that the site needs. All of this is done so specifically, that when it comes time to create another site, all of this code you already have is essentially useless. So that is the key, generating reusable code.
So now you start writing your code with an eye towards reusability, more generalized and atomic in nature. This is great, right?
Well, no, because there is still a fair amount of customization that must take place if the next web site has needs that were not addressed in the previous site. Sure, you can code some common components that most sites use, but what happens when the designer or developer needs to do something that hasn’t been previously coded. In this case, do you say “well at least we’re not rewriting the whole thing”, or do you continue to look for a better way to do things?
I vote for continuing to look for a better way of doing things.
Is it possible to build something so broad and general that it would work in 99 out of 100 deployments? I think so. Do I know how to do this? Not yet, but I have some ideas.
That is what this process is all about, exploring ideas.
What if we used XML to specify the elements of our pages? Doing so would allow a fairly non-technical person to come in and create a template for a page or an entire site.
We then translate the XML into a page using XSL, and for the backend admin, we build an engine that can parse the XML page and generate a form for editing.
Ok, the above was written this morning while I was feeling very ambitious. I was feeling like I could conquer the world. Now I am not so sure.
I am starting to understand why there are no good site/content management tools out there. In order to make something work for the masses, you have to make it so vanilla that it isn’t worth a damn. So that is why we all end up coding the same things over and over again.
Posted by Bryan Daneman on 10/2/2001 11:23:34 AM