14.03.2005 13:58 - All Quiet On The Blogging Front
I haven\'t made many entries lately, as I\'ve been engaged in a little project.
Warning
Those of you of a non-computer bent will probably be best sitting this post out.
A number of years ago, I wrote a complete offline content-management system in PHP, which is used to manage Shopping24, a large online catalogue system in Germany. Once I\'d finished this project, it struck me that with the forms-database-template management system I\'d written, I had on my hands a toolkit for building simple content management systems very quickly. I proceeded to use it as such on several client\'s websites.
Time passed, and I found myself in different circumstances. I never really pushed the CM system, although I found, to my delight, that it was very easy to create a website in it (about one day for a certain customer), and it was very easy to extend, due to it\'s object-oriented design. I wrote a basic shop in it in about an afternoon.
Anyway, time passed and the code sat in mothballs on my computer. When I started this blog, I hacked together some very simple PHP to allow me to make entries, and that has been in use for about a year. However, the blog has now expanded to the point where the shortcomings of this code are becoming extremely obvious, and so I decided to dig out the CMS code and rewrite the diary, news and guestbook system using it.
It\'s taken only two evenings of mucking around so far to get a workable system running. It would have been less if I had documented it properly. I also found a glaring bug which required considerable time to work out (what WAS I thinking when I wrote that bit of code?), but once it was apparent what it was, it took only one small line of code to fix.
Anyway, it\'s nearly ready for deployment here. Once it is deployed, I\'m thinking of releasing it publically. Until then, there\'s probably not going to be much written here, as I\'ll be concentrating on it. I already have several people interested in using it.
