What is the interest in a custom CMS?

[gunnarflax]

Hello everyone!

Lately I've been working on my own custom CMS and development library for websites. I know that there are A LOT of CMS:es currently out there but the thing is that I've always wanted a simple CMS that doesn't need a lot of dirty tweaks to get it as you want it. There are many themes for Wordpress who utilize the system in a way it wasn't originally designed to be because it's mainly a blogging platform, but a very loved one, and that is why many developers stick to it while it may not be the best for their project. And CMS:es like Drupal have a high learning curve and isn't that fun to get into (I know I never did).

So this is why I have tried my best, which isn't much, in creating a CMS which is (hopefully) perfect for personal sites, blogs, portfolios and company sites. As it is now it isn't fit for multiuser social sites but maybe that can be done later on. I started with working on this since I wanted a good CMS for my portfolio/personal blog website.

The thing is that I'm not the most experienced web developer out there. I've read a lot but not actually created many websites and don't know much about web security except for preventing SQL-injections. So I was wondering if there are any talented web programmers or system designers who would be willing to contribute to the project. My personal goal is for it to be a fully capable, versatile Open-Source (as in free software) CMS.

So I guess this thread is created to see what response this gets from the community :) Or at least to be able to get some feedback during development since I've never worked professionally. Please let me know your thoughts, comments, questions, doubts, visions etc. etc.

I won't be home again in a couple of days since I'm away with work but I will respond to all posts when I get back! Peace!

[larsmw]

Sounds like a fine idea from my point of view. I am happy about Drupal and have been using it for a few years now. It works fine for small prjects too. Can you provide some more information about your CMS? and a link so we can se the actual code?

[pritaeas]

I think if you want to attract developers to help build your CMS, you need at least a working demo to show your current status, a documentation of what you have, and a strict roadmap to avoid cluttering of features. If this is what you are after, perhaps sf.net or github could be a place to host your code.

[gunnarflax]

I don't think the system is ready for a demo yet and as I want to make a good first impression I need to develop it further. It's good to know that there is people willing to give it a closer look :) I'll post more information here when I get some live examples running (this could take a while since I've got a bit more to get working first).

[diafol]

Security, security, security. I assume it will be developed with OOP?

[gunnarflax]

Yes it will. As I said am I not the best at web security but I'm doing the best i can right now to add proper validation. I'm also redesigning the navigation system at the moment and I'm having trouble creating a menu system with infinite number of levels and also being able to use breadcrumbs.

Currently all menu entries have an id and a parent id that points to another entries id, that way you can now which children are under each parent. But if I want breadcrumbs with this I will need to do multiple queries or get all entries and sort them with php but that seems inefficient to me. Is there a better way to do this?

Sorry for the typos, I'm writing this on my android :p

[diafol]

Yeah, the recursion sounds a bit inefficient, but there again, how many levels are you looking at? Would anybody need more than say 5?? If a site is that deep, one could argue that it needs more than a 'simple' CMS or that the dev's design is a little odd (if the site itself is small).

You've probably seen this page?

http://evolt.org/node/4047/

and this:
http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/hierarchical-data.html

[gunnarflax]

No I've actually never read them, but they were very helpful! When you mention that the menus probably won't have too many levels then recursion might work pretty well. Since it's not a huge table as a post table for a forum and will probably not have many more entries than, say 50, I think it will do just fine. But I'll bookmark those pages for letter reference :) Thank you very much!