theusualsuspect.com

I’ve been procrastinating about writing an open source CMS for a while. From a personal point of view the aims of this project are as follows:

1. Have a new CMS to use at work
2. Write a large project using the Castle, NHibernate and Rhino trunks
3. Have a chance to gain feedback on my coding practices from other people

We currently already have a .Net CMS in place at work, however the system is roughly 4 years old and times and ideas have moved on. We have learnt a lot of lessons from the first version of the CMS and feel that we now have a greater understanding as to what an “average” CMS user can cope with and understand.

The purpose of this first blog about the CMS is to get some of my ideas down on paper. These ideas may well change, but we need a starting point. I’ve already started to code some elements of the CMS.

I currently see the functionality of the CMS being broken down into the following projects:

• Asset Library
• Content Management
• User Management
• Version Control
• Form Editor
• Navigation Management?
• Basic Image Manipulation Tool

The reason Navigation Management has a question mark next to it, is that I am undecided at this current time if the navigation of the site should be based on the documents created or if it should be handled completely separately.

I’ll blog about each of the projects separately. I already have a lot of the Asset Library code in place, and so this will be the topic of my next blog on Membrane.

As a general overview, the intention is to have a .Net CMS for developers and designers to create new sites from. This means that developers will have to write their own site level Controllers, Models and Views and compile those themselves. This should give a greater flexibility to the developers. I had given some consideration to trying to create a CMS where only the Views had to be created via a editing tool within the CMS but after quite a bit of playing around with things I found this would be too restrictive.

The CMS will be written with the intention of functionality being added via plugins, so plenty of standards will have to be put into place.

In regards to the front end work of the CMS I want the code to follow Web Standards and Accessibility guidelines. I’m no expert on UI design, so I’ll definitely be look for some help on this side of things.

Please feel to leave any suggestions.