cms

CMS wanted

jp.stacey 21 September 2006

I’m looking for a simple website management system (not necessarily a CMS, just something that can handle templates and a consistent look and feel) and an even simpler blogging system. The latter would have to be in PHP, but I’m easy either way otherwise.

Does anyone have any recommendations?

Taking Drupal to pieces

jp.stacey 17 April 2007

Since listening to Garrett Coakley speak at the first Geek Night on the topic of Drupal, I’ve been sniffing round that open-source CMS. He kindly came to speak to us again, and very inspiring it was too. We’re now having a deeper look at it, seeing what it can do, what are its strengths and weaknesses; that sort of thing.

Team Drupal FTW!

jp.stacey 26 June 2007

Coming to the end of the Drupal project on which I’m currently working, I spotted someone else’s brand new site on drupal.org: TeamSugar.

Drupal 6.0 out

jp.stacey 13 February 2008

Drupal 6.0 released. The smoothness of D6’s interaction with both user and developer is really breathtaking these days: as close to one-click installation as you’re likely to get on shared hosting; modules to help you port your own modules over from D5; and even automatically downloaded updates to (unhacked!) core. I had a look at the release candidates but owing to other responsibilities I haven’t had a chance to sit down and play with the actual release.

"One of a kind" is not necessarily a compliment

jp.stacey 10 November 2008
Assembler programmers rarely wire their own hardware; C programmers rarely write assembly language; Python programmers rarely compile C binaries. The creation of a website should not be delayed by having to work out how to write website construction systems.

If you want someone to build you a website, don't let them build you a bespoke CMS to help you manage it. I've fallen prey to this very temptation, although in my defence it was as much an investigation into technology and the structure of my own content as a solution to the problem of managing said content.

Any Drupal site can be an Acquia Drupal site

jp.stacey 1 January 2009
From tomorrow onwards.

A New Year's present from Dries Buytaert:

It didn't take long for us to realize that people wanted more than Acquia Drupal: they wanted support for everything Drupal 6.x -- all modules, themes and custom code. The good news is that Acquia is a nimble company so the last weeks we worked on changing our support model to address customer demands. Starting tomorrow, we will support everything Drupal 6.x -- not just Acquia Drupal but all modules and themes available on drupal.org as well as custom code.

Inline edit links, but not editing inline

jp.stacey 2 May 2009
Squaring the circle of simple CMS usability with complex content representations, with a neat low-footprint Drupal module

It's heartwarming, really encouraging to see that Drupal 7 is undergoing a usability review. Drupal's a massively functional CMS, but all the functionality in the world won't help you when the average (for which read: can't write HTML, let alone PHP) CMS user can't discover it.

The problem of many types of content

jp.stacey 10 May 2009
All snowflakes are unique, but some are more unique than others

David Yelvington mentioned back in December 2008 that his Drupal site had over 30 content types:

Why on earth so many content types? It's easy to see good reasons for news items to be structurally more complex than a simple blog post. But we also have some types of content you probably wouldn't think about at first. Wire stories are an interesting case.... Promos are another....

EditInline second alpha release

jp.stacey 25 May 2009
Further improvements to EditInline mean it's actually worth a second alpha release. Good heavens.

EditInline was first discussed here. It's a Drupal module that provides your site with handy editing links, inline with each node title, which rather than taking you to a separate editing page use a lightbox overlay on the current page to provide an inline editing interface.

It's currently in alpha but available under GPL on the Torchbox public subversion repository.

New alpha version of Drupal EditInline module

jp.stacey 29 June 2009
EditInline is four, er, alpha subversions old. I bought it a cake.

My Drupal module for editing nodes inline EditInline is at version ɑ-0.4. Just to summarize, the module lets you edit either the current node (or any other node where the title comes from Views or node template rendering) in a lightbox overlay.