Hi all,For some time now, we've been discussing moving the website out of CMSMS. I'd like to start a discussion of the pros and cons of doing this and also talk about some techniques we could use for accomplishing the task if we decide to do it. Here is the jira task: http://issues.fluidproject.org/browse/FLUID-3355
Advantages that CMSMS gives us:1) The ability to allow various community members to post to the website with specific roles such as editor, administrator, and designer. We do not take advantage of this ability right now. The only people who edit the website all have admin access and there are very few accounts. 2) CMSMS allows us to use fixed templates for the header, footer and other common code blocks so we don't have to edit and maintain common code blocks on each page. 3) CMSMS provides some add ons, such as the news pages, breadcrumbs, menu generation and rss feeds with very little work. It also provides a maintenance mode for when we are doing upgrades (a site down message is displayed.
Disadvantages:1) Being constrained by CMSMS has made editing somewhat onerous for experienced web app developers. The CSS is stored in the DB in one place, the common code chunks in another, the content for individual pages in another place. The interface for editing the pages is not very user friendly for people who are used to tweaking html in text editors or using their favourite html editing environment. 2) CMSMS continues to evolve and updates are tricky. There is always a danger of breaking the site when we upgrade and not upgrading puts the website at risk for security flaws. 3) Having the website in CMSMS does not allow us to version the site or revert changes easily.
So, if we are merely using CMSMS because of advantages 2 and 3, we should think about alternative techniques.
Some thoughts:a) We are a javascript focused project - maybe we should use javascript to tackle these problems. This could have the advantage of allowing us to showcase the Fluid framework on our own website. Colin suggested using something like Kettle to manage various includes. Jess also suggested I develop a 'menu component'. b) I've been doing a lot of PHP lately for the builder. PHP is another option. I think its main advantage is that it would be quick to swap over the current CMSMS site to PHP.
I am sure the community has lots of ideas to contribute on this subject, so looking forward to your thoughts.
Laurel
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