Design a Simple 1-Man CMS

My Idea of using customized windows folders (see vebwiew) as a GUI was noble, exciting but impractical. (more…)

As I mentioned in Content Management Philosphy structure should be seperated from content. This is often neglected in the much-quoted “seperate content from layout” buzz-phrase. But what is structure and why is it important? (more…)

Trying to make a simple CMS is not so simple. The urge is always there to produce a CMS which can do “everything” because of the risk of producing a CMS which is “too simple” and just can’t do some things. In fact, I want to produce a CMS Framework which CAN do “everything” BUT by clever use of defaults CAN ALSO be simple. (more…)

How does one specify which template a page has? In Prototype 2 each page had a <template> tag to specify it’s template. An attractive alternative springs to mind based on the following disadvantages of the <template> tag. (more…)

Just thought I’d jot down some more guiding principles:

• Zero-Code - Try to minimize coding (read bugs)
• Stand on the shoulders of giants
• No proprietary languages/syntax

I want to avoid a database if possible. Let’s run with the XML Theme and store everything in XML Files. One great big XML file for everything is out. I like the directory approach because it leaves navigation up to the operating system. A webmaster can browse folders to find templates, components and page data. (more…)

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…)

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.