On Wednesday, October 17, 2001, at 05:11 PM, templates- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> The problem is, no two people on earth agree about what a "content > management" system is. Some people think it's the ability to edit web > pages > through a browser text field. Others think its version control. Still > others think it's workflow and templating for data. As you've > discovered > though, about 99% of the open source world thinks 'Content Management > System' eq 'Slashdot'. > > Building a useful system would be fun. I've considered building > something > to handle static files by hooking up mod_perl with CVS and providing a > web > GUI for basic site workflow. I've also considered building a system > that > provides workflow, scheduling, and versioning for user-defined data > objects, > probably using OpenInteract. The trouble is, with so little agreement > about > goals and requirements, it's hard to get started without an actual > project > that needs it. Does anyone out there remember the project I was working on? Iaido (nee Iaijutsu)? Unfortunately, I had to mothball it so I could work on projects at a new job and have a life at the same time. But it looks like I'm about to leave that job now and go to a new one where I might actually have some free time to work on it. (The saddest thing is that the Next Big Thing I've been working on gets to die where I leave it :( ) Mostly mentioning it to see a) if anyone remembered it, b) if anyone would be interested in seeing it live again, and c) if anyone's interested in nailing down some goals and requirements, as Perrin says. Reason I mention it here is because TT was one of the primary reasons it was actually working well. Anyway, short description: Take an object persistence framework that works both as LDAP-like attribute directory and virtual filesystem. Take a web app server, with sessioning and other goodies, that maps request URLs onto object lookups and method invocations on those objects. Persistent objects have methods called by URL requests, which display results using TT2. Templates used by the objects have a Javascript-like interface to the rest of the framework. (ie. a list of latest news items displayed by a news folder object might use something like [% FOREACH item = self.contents %] to gain contents to itself, and might have [% parent.url %] to construct a link to the parent section of the site). URL-accessible Methods on all objects are mediated by an ACL system, and content is web-editable, FTP accessible, and I even had an experimental Perl FS mounting under Linux. It was trying to compete with Zope in Python. I was getting close on versioning, workflow, and scheduling, and had a lot of other neat things lined up. It also has a lot of very braindead stuff in it, so I was thinking of starting over with the same concept because I still think a lot of the ideas were solid. I keep thinking I might want to start over in Java, but I keep forgetting why I think that... Anyway, any interest? -- Leslie Michael Orchard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ICQ: 492905 (home) 11082089 (work) "...see you space cowboy..."
