Design a Simple 1-Man CMS

Is TAL an alternatuve to XSLT which can be more easily edited, managed and understood by webmasters? (more…)

XSLT was the obvious choice for bringing content and layout together but is it easy enough for most webmasters to understand? (more…)

Could Ant be used as a CMS Engine? Apparently it supports XSLT Transformations but I’m worried about the learning curve. How many webmasters know ANT? (more…)

Tools, technologies, platforms, schools-of-though. Definitely the hottest area of debate but I’m not aiming to be the best. This project is more of a “what if” attempt with a clearly defined target audience. Simple, client-side cms, static web site structure, no Java, PHP, MySQL… (more…)

A Component is a block of content plus a template - a “piece” of a website - such as an infobox, a footer or an image or just a piece of text. (more…)

A template is a way of defining how content and layout come together to form a page. (more…)

An Container is a placeholder in a template for some content (or component). (more…)

A Component is a block of content (information) including a design which can be positioned on a page.

I envision 3 main types of Components:

• Global - Can be re-used on any page
• Page - A specific page or article
• Simple - A simple data type

Global Components could be things like a standard footer, a corporate logo+slogan or even a small infobox of links which can be re-used on any pages.

Each page would have only 1 Page Component which would be the main “body” of that page. E.g. an article. There would be nothing against re-using this type of component (or parts thereof) on other pages to for example generate a list of products with short descriptions linking to the main product page.

Our “1 man” site editor could even place these components with drag and drop or by simply choosing a component from a drop down list inside a layout’s containers.

A layout would define what types of components could be placed where.

Design refers to the appearance of the page independently of layout. Design is safely represented by CSS (Cascading Stylesheets) and deals with colors, fonts, sizes, borders, images.

Structure is the hierachy relationship between pages and is identical to the sitemap. The start page is first in the hierachy followed by n level 1 child pages with their child pages and so on… A simple hierachy can be represented in a database by a 2-field table (object_id, parent_id).