CMS

[Tom Novelli]

On 10/25/06, Brian Rice <water at tunes.org> wrote:
....
> > I'll volunteer to -- do it *this month*, as soon as I get enough input
> > on the wording.
>
> Sorry, maybe this was intended as a specific request for input on the
> wording... I suggest you just start trying to do it, and
> incrementally get feedback. The worst that happens is that the good
> PR we get for trying to do the site is tarnished just slightly by
> exposing some of our editing process.

Ok, I've gone and changed the front page... the month is over and
nobody has complained.  I backed up /serv/tunes/tunes/ this morning,
in preparation for some major clean-up... I'll just start chopping...
if I get carried away, just let me know and I'll fix it!

At the last minute I remembered the website is maintained by CVS, and
rebuilt every midnight.... It's an arcane system but it works, and
it's not so bad for me now that I finally have broadband internet.  I
suppose we should keep it until we have a replacement ready...?

Here's the plan:

- Pinch some Wiki formatting code from Cliki and a JS wiki; adapt to
make them match; rewrite later.

- Set up a simple web-based editing system... (Enter a password, edit
pages like a wiki, stored as text files... Convert to HTML upon
saving.)  Write new material in this "wiki" format... adapt the format
as needed.

- Design a database to *organize* the content in a fairly fine-grained
way, with robust security, versioning, cross-referencing, etc.


I have CMUCL, SBCL, UCW, MySQL, CLSQL and CL-AJAX sitting here;
hopefully I'll get into the web/db stuff this weekend.  I think I've
learned enough Lisp by now.

My initial impression of Common Lisp is that it's over-complicated and
it doesn't have as nice a codebase as Python because it's not as
popular (although guys like Fare are working hard to change that).
Still, Lisp seems like the Right Thing (tm) in the long run.  Ideally,
I think, we'd design a cleaner dialect of Lisp for use as an
all-purpose intermediate language, and implement CL, Slate, Python,
ECMAscript, etc. on top of that.  I prefer Python's syntax.  The nice
thing about CL is, it's mature.  Does all this make sense?

- Tom