Keith Devens .com

CMS To Do List

This is just me thinking out loud again....

CMS To Do List:

• Have nice URLs
  • So use Mod_Rewrite
  • But see if you can make it optional so as to reduce the requirements
• Be extensible
  • Modules
  • Templates
    • See if you can integrate Smarty
  • Have an API to access the database. No one touches the database directly.
• Caching
  • Customizable schedule
    • Per page
    • According to a given action
      • When a comment is posted, regenerate the page
      • When a new weblog entry is posted, regenerate the page
• Metadata
  • Each document has meta data. Automatically available to any user of the document.
  • As part of extensibility, each module author can store whatever meta data he wants to.
• Default modules
  • Weblog
  • Wiki
  • Articles
  • Pages
  • Maybe a FAQ module?
  • Slideshow module?
  • Photo gallery module?
• You can stick comments (nested if you want) on anything.
• Administration
  • Multi-user
  • Customizable permission levels
  • Site-wide data
    • Name of site, administrator e-mail, etc.
• Any type of document is "revisionable".
  • You can store multiple revisions
  • Go back to an older one, etc.
• Search: everything is searchable.
  • MySQL is nice to us with a full text search
• Implementation details:
  • Everything that is user-editable is stored in the database.
    • That way you can edit everything through the web
    • All objects can be exposed through XML-RPC, I suppose
    • Also, an optional daemon will be available that will expose all objects through FTP.
  • Database independence?
    • Target MySQL first, for obvious reasons
    • ADOdb or PearDB?
• Nice features:
  • You can use StructuredText in any kind of document.
  • This goes well with Wikis, but you can use it for your pages, weblog, etc.
• And of course, it has to be fast or it's not worth it.

I just read PostNuke's module developer information. It was interesting to read, because I'm taking a completely different approach, at least to data storage.

Everything (except metadata and comments, most likely) will be stored in one "documents" table. Each "module" will "own" a document. What's nice is that if you have a weblog post and you want to reuse the content for something else, you can hit a button to copy it over and make it a wiki page, or an article, or a regular page on your site.

Permalink | 4 Comments | Tags: Programming | id 2675

03:51 (utc-4)
edited: 04:48 (utc-4)