Hi all,
Inspired by the needs, comments and wishes of Dave Shae's "Wanted: CMS" post on Mezzoblue <http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2004/01/09/wanted_cms/>, I'm taking up the challenge, and building the CMS I've always wanted (which it looks like Dave and others wanted too). Off the top of my head, with no warranty whatsoever, I'd like it to be distributed under a license similar to MT's multi-license for personal/commercial/pro use, or even GPL.
More (and less) than a CMS, what I'm aiming at is a framework which provides a simple CMS, but more importantly offers a killer API for plug-ins and extensions. I'm 100% convinced that the perfect CMS doesn't exist, but I hope that I can build one that meets basic needs, with unlimited scope for extensions.
I'm NOT building another blog tool (although there will be a blog plug-in), and I'm not building a bloated portal system that can do everything and anything (although the plug-in API would allow for it all)... what I'm building is a system that answers *my* common requirements, and hopefully those of a large number of developers out there in the process.
My assumption (and my need) is a system where the developer (me for example) sets up the site, creates the content models and templates, creates the CSS, hooks in new plug-ins (or even builds a new one), then hands it over to content writers and editors to run on a day-by-day basis. As such, my target market isn't really website owners, but website developers acting on behalf of website owners.
Naturally the content-adding back-end will need to be usable by regular office staff, but the areas that the developers deal with (creating new content models and templates) will be quite raw (no need to write a template engine when PHP already is one, etc).
It's quite possible I've got this all wrong, and this isn't what other people want at all, but that's OK, because I still want it for me and my clients. Even so, I'm keen to get the ball rolling on a wish-list of features (keeping in mind that this is supposed to be lightweight, allowing as much freedom as possible to develop add-ons) from everyone out there.
To start the ball rolling, here are a *few* of mine:
- LAMP based (possibly with a DB abstraction layer)
- page (rather than post) oriented, with regular dir & file hierarchy, simple SE friendly URLs, etc
- extensibility through a simple but open plug-in API
- works on a basic install of PHP (no recompiles and external libs)
- different content models (a news post is different to a recipe, blog post, tech article, etc etc)
Feel free to keep emails private or public, and if you want to be involved in Beta testing etc (and get a freebie in the process), just let me know.
Thanks, Justin French
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