Today I've been exploring CMS's. That's Content Management System. It's basically the software they use on portals and super-blogs. All database driven. I'm not sure that I've got any use for it. You write articles, provide titles, assign them to categories, publish them to channels. It's a lot of work for a blog - but this is what a lot of bloggers are using. That's why I'm exploring. I'm surprised at how limiting the software is. You basically get some feeds with some added extras. That creates a website. The extras are usually forums, soapboxes, shopping carts, whatever. But I have to know what the big picture is, because that's the canvas on which I draw.

I worked on a CMS back at AOL. It's the holy grail for web developers. Instead of writing a bunch of separate applications to post and view various forms of data such as photos, blogs, playlists, news, etc. - you should just have one application that's a swiss army knife. Store any data. View any data. Categorize any data. The problem is in practice you can never get there. Somebody always needs a particular feature for version x.yz which requires you to handle a piece of data specially. Then it's no longer generic. Now your swiss army knife is nothing but a phillips screwdriver. It's refreshing to see that nobody has been able to do any better in the prevailing five years. I can quickly see which feature set caused them to depart from the path of ideal truth.

In fact we've had the ultimate CMS for years - but nobody has realized it. It's the combination of web server, database (or file system), and programming interface. You can store anything with it and create any application you wish and publish it to the web. The typical complaint I'll hear is that 'I don't want to learn how to program in some weird language - I just want to publish'. Friend, if you are using any modern CMS, you have learned to program in some weird language.