More thoughts on the subject:
What I was looking for is probably better described as "online website
creation tool". The creator should be guided through some simple steps.
1. Type, copy or upload texts
2. Put the data in a group/section
3. Chose a site navigation concept
a. navigation widget
b. navigation location
4. Add details to pages
5. Decorations
Or probably starting with the theme and then insert the content.
Anyway. This would be using TT for generation of frames, table layouts
and navigation widgets.
Everything should be changeable. Trying to make it as easy as possible
without restricting the design options.
And all the components used should be usable in normal web-sites. You
shouldn't have to use the "framework" to use its components. And you
should be able to plug in new sorts of component to chose from.
And all components should inherit the design style of the parent. It
should also use the authorisation method provided (could be one or
more).
Except site navigation, text-blocks, image-maps, there would be
components such as contact forms, polls, news, banners, search, and
more. The most important components would be data presentation
components, generating views on database tables.
Components could use other components. And a subcomponent could look
and behave and be different based on the properties inherited from
site-wide properties.
All this would take a long time to finish. But I just searching for a
direction to go. I plan to create something useful in ... two days.
Anything would be useful compared to nothing. :-)
But it should be something that could work both with and without DB.
Everything could be done with configuration files in web-site
directories.
Well... I will probably use a special mod_perl handler and a DB. But
you should not have to do a specific installation for each virtual
host. And the components should work in existing web-sites as well as
in web-sites constructed with the system.
And it would be good if they even could work one by one without
mod_perl, by .htaccess configuration alone.
I did a quick hack showing what you can do a web form-mail plain-text
content updating system for normal static HTML pages. I just scanned
the page for non-markup text strings and generated a form and another
window with the original page, but with each text substituted with a
number, showing where each field in the form came from.
The same program could be used for customising the update page by
removing uninteresting fields, naming them, and more. ... The system
will work without any configuration. But could be customised. It
could also share an API with other content editing components. A
framework could choose which content editing component to use based on
the target, using this system as a last choice. And all of them could
use the same API for storing properties. It would use a database if
present, otherwise using local plain-text configuration files.
I don't know exactly how to construct such a general CMS. But we
would have to think about how to handle the basic problems of session
management and how to inherit properties.
--
/ Jonas - http://jonas.liljegren.org/myself/en/index.html
