The CMS quest, continued...

Since Drupal is out of the running for my preferred CMS environment, I've still been looking at all the others. I've installed and setup probably around fourty of these things so far. Nucleus and Blog:CMS are derived from one of the original LAMP  public domain scripts.  This collection of scripts is probably at the heart of a vast majority of the CMS software in existence and has been extended and hacked into entire families of content systems. Nucleus is one of the more primitive of the lot, and hence more configurable.  Blog:CMS  is more of a value-derived unit and adds enough  external modules to make it almost useful.  Both turn out to be a great framework for multi-blogging; however they're single category systems. Multiple category references requires a plugin. They work OK, but to get 'em right you've got to install and trust a whole lot of external modules.

So I went back to cmsmatrix.org and plugged in all the things I'm looking for. XMLRPC. Events. Multi-Blog. Community. Forums. Feeds. Built-in (not plugin) HTML editor. CSS based themes. A few other things. Got back about twenty hits. Out of a couple of hundred possibilities. Looked at every one. None that I have already evaluated were even on the list.

Commercial licenses are out. I still need to do some work on this software to get it to do what I ultimately want, so it needs a clean and extensible interface free of license restrictions. That knocked the field down to six.

Gak. Plugins. Look I want plugins, but I don't want to plugin the whole meat and potatoes of a working site. 

One was in German. Really nicely done, except that even though it's easy to translate the site into any language, the source code is in German. Sigh... Another one down.

That left two. Next one was in French. OK, then what's left? Tikiwiki. Now that's amusing. The perfect development environment for my needs turns out to be a wiki portal. But it makes sense. Wikis are documentation engines usually used by tech writers and librarians. People who write for a living - organized into communities. Creation, categorization, and referencing content are implicit.

Tiki also has the social aspects built in. Buddy lists and avatars. Built-in automatic defenses against spam invaders. Personalized themes and pages. About the only thing that I find it necessary to change right away is that it looks, uhm, like a wiki - no matter which of the supplied 30-40 CSS skins you put on it. An over-abundance of teeny font sizes and dotted lines. In its favor the code itself is readable and not abstracted to obscurity, and the style sheets are clean CSS, not "php over CSS".

Contrast that with the other systems, which are written by and for software geeks. Either to make money, or as collections of freelance module developers trying to add on enough features to make the thing work. They're programming communities, producing algorithms and metaphors and features. Wikis are writing communities, producing documentation.  Which do you think makes the better document managing system? Duh!

My quest for the perfect development CMS continues. Drupal seemed like a good choice before, but it has issues. It's fairly easy to create a full-featured multi-user website, but the background application is fairly unstable, and the security sub-system is ridiculously complex. Complexity in a security module, bad.

So I lined up a few more to try. E107, which has almost the right features. Not quite. Geeklog turned out to be a nice option. Security is its strong point. However not so easily extensible, and it still doesn't have everything I'm looking for. I tried about ten other CMS packages that aren't memorable at all. Then I tried out the king of the hill. Typo3. It's extremely well done. The code is impeccably clean. Written for professional content developers. Consequently, it's very difficult to use.

Maybe I'll haveta' write my own...

Yvent.org is the domain for my new venture. I don't yet have a website set up, but I'll pull in one of my CMS packages in the next few days.


Yvent.org is dedicated to extending RSS and ATOM to support event information, such as calendar events. This has to be done, and nobody is doing it. Those that are doing it are doing it wrong. So it looks like I've gotta' be the one to evangelize doing it right... Sigh...

The best way to describe this work is be defining what it is not. It is not mod_event, which was an initial foray into providing event info over RSS1.0. That was done in RDF, and not complete enough to be useful.

It also is not hCalendar micro-formats. Imagine parsing HTML embedded in XML. Really. Yukko.

It also is not iCal. Microsoft invented iCal and it isn't XML and it's not suitable for the modern age.

It also is not 'iCal in RDF'. Somebody actually wrote a spec for this.

What it is - is event information in everyday information feeds, made easy enough that any kid can implement it. This is what led to the success of RSS  in the first place.

I'll be writing an RFC. But so as not to step on any toes, I think it should have it's own space. Maybe I'll just refer to it as  ERSS. That's enough for now. I'll write more as this starts to materialize.