CMS

[Tom Novelli]

On 10/10/06, Brian Rice <water at tunes.org> wrote:
>
> Hey, Tom. It's good that a couple more of us have met, finally. We
> really ought to meet in one place all at once somehow, perhaps for a
> free/cheap existing conference like OSCON. I've wondered sometimes
> how different the project would have been if this had been done long
> ago, in 1996.

I'm all for it, and Sara loves to travel... we're getting married in
May, so a trip to Portland in July seems unlikely... maybe our
musician friends can tell us how to do it on a tight budget.  When I
find a nice cushy programming job, then it'll be a different matter!

There should be a "travel plans matrix" on the new CMS... People on
one axis, months on the other.  I wonder if Google offers such a
service already?

> > I'm putting together a prototype CMS (Content Management System) to ....
>
> Thanks. Do we need to roll a new one? I can understand if it means
> less effort, but it'd be good to know how that is achieved.

The hardest part is writing for a wider audience, and the database
design is a bit tricky... the general WWW stuff is pretty
straightforward.  Of course I want to study the source code of some
existing CMS's, but in my experience, these things are generally 90%
stuff we don't need, and lacking a few key features.

> Common Lisp has UCW (Uncommon Web) which is component-based and
> therefore suitable for a CMS but it's not a CMS itself. I just had
> some experiments done in it (hacking together a competitor for an
> existing web-2.0 site) using the UCW-boxset tarball for ease-of-
> installation purposes, and it's pretty good. There are also plenty of
> free AJAX toolkits (prototype, dojo, yahoo's) that can be tied to web
> apps with not too much effort - very few are actually strongly bound
> to a particular server API.

Thanks for the capsule reviews... it looks like we may have a winner
here.  I've been studying up on Lisp this week, and I finally "get it"
now that I've dealt with Forth, Python, etc. and had that talk with
Fare.  If Lisp is so important to TUNES, we should just use it
whenever practical, and Lisp-haters like myself will just have to come
around eventually.  I should try to explain in writing what convinced
me, before I forget!  Anyway, as if that's not enough, Lisp offers a
stable language and better compilers than those other languages.  I
presume that it'll integrate with SQL and AJAX just fine.

I suppose we could use a few *short* PHP scripts here and there, for
expediency's sake, at least in the beginning.  We can build the CMS
incrementally... *anything* to make web-page editing convenient would
be nice, at this point.

> I hadn't noticed the Wikipedia deletion. That's kind of sad that
> people still classify us only as a vapourware project when we're a
> perfectly acceptable visionary documentation site.

But first impressions are important... and our site says "We're just
another OS project that's been dormant for 3 years".  It would be a
huge improvement just to show that we're still alive, and to mention
the visionary aspect right up front.  In fact, we should -- I mean,
I'll volunteer to -- do it *this month*, as soon as I get enough input
on the wording.

But anyway, it's time to put the past behind us!

- Tom