My New CMS is Coming Along Nicely
After a fair bit of work over the past month or so (since when kapiti.geek.nz started), my new CMS is starting to take shape.
Today, I finished off adding the content managed pages as seen in the (sparsely populated) Software section.
The best thing about the new Content type though, is that it fulfilled all of the criteria I want for all the new content types which I will be adding to it. So far, the Blog type (which is used for /blog/) is mostly there but doesn't quite fit the abstraction I want it to. The DB class is fine, but the display pages are lacking since I'd written them for this site before I wrote them for the CMS.
On the other hand, I wrote all of the display code for the Content type before I wrote anything for this site and it turned out well. Out of the box, the CMS will support 'text', 'code' and 'html' types - weird I know but it proves the concept. Despite this, I assign my pages a content type of Phliky then, in kapiti.geek.nz, I override the display of that particular type and don't have another jot of work to do :-)
Inadvertently, though I guess I am inclined that way, this new CMS pretty much follows the MVC pattern. I'm not always sure that this is necessary but once a project starts getting big, then it's the best way to go and hopefully this one will get bigger.
As an example, the database interface code is written in Perl modules. The admin interface (which could be termed the controller) is written in Perl/Mason and is a part of the CMS code. The View pages have default versions in the CMS code, but can be overridden with the website pages, which is the technique I used to display a phliky type in the content pages. This approach seems to be the way it turned out and the way it will continue to move forward.
Oh and by the way, I haven't yet worked out a name for it. At the moment, the working title is Fli since it is a play on Fly and hopefully should be really fast. If anyone has any suggestions, let me know.
This post originated on http://chilts.org/.
Email me on andychilton -at- gmail -dot- com.