Chris Kelley: Content Management Systems

/pnhtoolbar/

Fri, 25 Apr 2003 07:31:16 GMT

A nice toolbar for Mozilla contains a collection of tools that web developers might find useful. Nice debugging tolls in case you are having problems with your layout. Created as an experiment in XUL+JX, /pnhtoolbar/ is a good example of the useful extensibility of Mozilla.

Textpattern: Elegant CMS

Wed, 23 Apr 2003 16:16:07 GMT

OK - I'm too slammed to test this Content Management System out, but so far it looks realy nice. Page templates use CSS from the git-go, there is a nice page layout process, and it looks like it has some sort of form-builder. And spigots too! If Postnuke is like going to your first concert (Cheap Trick) and smoking for the first time, then Textpattern is like having coffee with Nina Simone in heaven. (Wow - a terrible turn of words...sorry about that...)

CMS testing: Geeklog

Sat, 19 Apr 2003 08:41:50 GMT

Impressions of Geeklog: Geeklog sure is fast! It really makes my Postnuke installation feel really tubby. It's a great CMS for someone who wants an instant portal - it features a nice calendar, 6 skins out of the box, some simple customisation, and clean user interface. If it had better multi-lingual support, I would seriously consider it. They seem to have pretty good docs, so I could probably bake in the multi-linual suppport I am seeking.

Testing Content Management Systems

Sat, 19 Apr 2003 08:33:46 GMT

I am currently testing a few open-source content managment systems. Some requirements:

Good developer documentation
Multi-lingual support:

ability to target a post to different language versions of a site
User may select preferred language form home page

Simple template editing - does not necessarily need to be forms-based
Developer can easily add fields to user database, as well as to article/file submissions
html or php files created outside the system can be easily integrated into the CMS's permissions system
Flexible permissions system
New posts e-mailed to subscribers
Database abstraction layer, with ability to work with mysql or others

Wishlist:

xml-rpc or SOAP interface to CMS internals (or at least suppport for Blogger API)
Ability to implement user blogs
News aggregator

Checking server status with your aggregator

Fri, 04 Apr 2003 09:53:03 GMT

I've been looking for a good way to serve an rss feed of server data. Here is a nice rdf format: RDF Site Summary 1.0 Modules: Service Status

How-to: WYSIWYG Editing for Mozilla and Radio Userland using Midas

Tue, 11 Mar 2003 16:40:31 GMT

Mozilla and Radio Userland should go together like peanut butter and jelly. But editing in Mozilla has been pretty ugly - no fancy WYSIWYG editor like they have on IE. I have tested out Composite several times, but it went through a period when it was pretty broken, and I lost interest in it. The Midas project got my attention, and when I read recently that it worked in recent builds of Mozilla, I figured it was time to give it a try. In my implementation, I am transferring the contents of the Midas iframe to and from the server using a hidden textarea and some javascript. I just posted some files to the gems folder that explain how I got Midas working with Radio Userland. You should use a recent Mozilla build - I'm using 1.3b 20030204. Here are the files:

I wish I knew of an easier way to package them for Radio Userland consumption... Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Using Midas in Radio Userland: It Works!

Mon, 10 Mar 2003 09:17:32 GMT

I am doing some tests using Midas to enable a rich text editing (WYSIWYG) in Mozilla and Radio Userland. Useful Links:

If you are seeing this post, then it works! I'll have a how-to available soon.

Skinny legs and all: Impressions of NewsMonster

Sun, 09 Mar 2003 10:37:38 GMT

I've been using NewsMonster for a couple of weeks. Since I have been a Radio Userland user for at least a year now for reading news feeds, I had to change some of my habits to get used to NewsMonster. Change is good.

I really like having the feeds display its own sidebar - if I am rushed for time, I can easily select the feeds I *need* to read. FM RadioStation has a similar feature; however, they do it MS Outlook-style, offering a 3-pane view of news feeds, which is pretty darn nice.
The java-based aggregator is buggy - sometimes it chokes while it is processing the subscriptions.rdf file, which is the xml list of feeds to which the user is subscribed. This morning it had a problem processing the sitefilters listed in subscriptions.rdf - no big deal (I don't really need them) - I used a text editor and took them out. There probably needs to be a little more validation when news feeds are added to the subscription list.
I have to explicitly start the aggregator when I want it to collect the feeds or update the current list. This process should be automatic, upon browser start-up (perhaps configurable in prefs) and per the specs in each site's RSS file.
There needs to be a way to post to your blog from NewsMonster.

I drinking the koolaid - I support what Kevin Burton, developer of Newsmonster is doing - and I've hit the Paypal button on his website to encourage development of NewsMonster. His moves echo some of the things that Dave Winer, progenitor of Radio Userland, did to capture my attention (and to earn some of my money):

Discusses issues that I find interesting in his blog
Passionate about his work
Supports many of the ideas behind the open source movement, while still acknowledging the need to make a living.

Initial Impressions of FM RadioStation

Sun, 09 Mar 2003 10:04:41 GMT

If I were still using Internet Explorer for browsing, I would really like this alot. (I'm using Mozilla.) Still, FM RadioStation is a pretty impressive front-end for Radio Userland, which is a blogging newsreader. I am especially impressed that they offer tabs for the Browsing component. And there's a spellchecker for the blogging app! A couple of kinks:

Tabs should load in the background.
Not all of my categories (17) show in the Publish section

I'm committed to using Mozilla as my main web platform; therefore, I'm using the standard browser-based Radio Userland for blogging and NewsMonster for reading RSS feeds.

Rich text editing finally available for Mozilla

Mon, 10 Feb 2003 12:30:54 GMT

This is a big deal. Works great in Mozilla 1.3b Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.3b) Gecko/20030204

More xml-rpc goodness

Wed, 08 Jan 2003 07:52:29 GMT

I really want to use xml-rpc as a transport mechanism to help me manage a couple of websites. This morning I checked out an xml-rpc request builder that is currently called Konstructor (name change pending). It did a fine job of building the message; unfortunately, it choked on the flood of data from my server. It delivers a biiiiig struct. Next I checked out Scott Andrew's xmlrpc-socket-based test script. Again, this implementation bailed, but in a different manner. Hmmmm - is there a problem in what my Cold Fusion-based xml-rpc server is delivering? Finally, I gave a nice Java Web Start-based application a spin. Aloha's Inspector relies on system.listMethods to prompt the user with a dropdown of mothods to use. Very nice; unfortunately, I was not using this method. Back to the drawing board. Once I whipped up that method, it worked fine! I really do like where Aloha is going on this Java application. And the source code is available!

Mozilla client for MySQL

Sat, 04 Jan 2003 12:51:20 GMT

Now I'd like one that works with Postgresql...

YASP Software has created some e-commerce online shops with MySQL backends. Our clients are using kind of traditional admin systems to view and amend information. HTML/JavaScript/Forms -- HTTP -- WWW SERVER -- SCRIPTS -- MySQL If we are talking about 1,000+ products selling online I can guess about the speed and usability of such interface. Slow, slow, slow. Especially when we need to provide various complex customizable reports and flexible product management. So well. We are looking for a better solution! XUL/JavaScript -- XPCOM -- MySQL XPCOM shown above is exactly the part we have created. It allows to build MySQL interfaces in pure JavaScript. Right now. Well... if you are able to install it :-)

Blogs and Newsreaders: back and forth?

Thu, 05 Dec 2002 08:37:48 GMT

Russ [Russell Beattie Notebook] has a great post on reading blogs with a newsreader using Genecast. I like this blog -> NNTP idea, but why not go the other way round: NNTP -> blog? I'm still pretty dissatisfied with most blog authoring interfaces - I'm looking for the following:

Works on Mozilla as well as IE
Rich interface (GUI for simple markup such as bold and italics)
Interface to MetaWeblog API/Blogger API

Mozblog working with Radio Userland is coming close, but couldn't we go one step further in the GUI department and use the NNTP reader that is built-in to Mozilla? The NNTP user interface is compelling:

Folder view on left pane to display subscribed blogs, with built-in alerts for new messages
Nice composer GUI for new posts
Can easily copy a blog post to another folder in your mail archive - or to remote IMAP server.
Posts can be read off-line (Radio Userland does this also)

Wishlist:

It would be great to be able to post comments to blog posts in the same way you comment to newsgroups - hit reply. So, does the genecast RSS -> NNTP service have an interface to blogcomments? Those comments should be nested beneath the post.
How would categories fit into the NNTP scenario? Could I have a view of my blog posts based upon category? How would I post to several categories? Would that be the equivalent to cross-posting to several newsgroups? Hmmmm - perhaps each category would be the equivalent to a newsgroup:
- vetula.books
- vetula.bulgaria.news
- vetula.linux
- etc...
Interface to MetaWeblog API/Blogger API

If Genecast can do these things, I would certainly be interested in subscribing to their service. Is it worth $36/year? Could they offer a blogger rate? Some interesting NNTP links:

Forumzilla - a Mozilla XUL-based application that provides a three-paned Usenet newsreader-like interface to web discussion forums. I think it is inactive. What's interesting is that it is similar in concept to the blog browsers everyone is talking about.
Colobus, a news (nntp) server written in perl that serves up ezmlm mailing list archives as newsgroups.
php-based web to nntp gateways

PostNuke : Enhanced RSS feed

Tue, 03 Dec 2002 13:47:10 GMT

Wow - Navigating the PostNuke site is quite tough - I just wanted to see how to make an RSS feed from site postings. At last - a solution: "To avoid confusion that some of you are having, this feature is already included in PN .72x ... To enable it, open your backend.php. Near the top of the file, is a variable $show_content = 0. Change it to $show_content=1 to enable the feature."[from Enhanced RSS feed :: pnModules :: PostNuke Modules]

Connecting people, software, data and content faster than ever before -- that was my experience.

Sat, 30 Nov 2002 17:04:34 GMT

I'm posting from MozBlog - I finally got it working on Moz. 1.2. If you want to try it out, be sure to go to Radio Prefs and enable the Blogger API. It's pretty nice - I think the text formatting bits come from Mozilla's built-in Composer.

Connecting people, software, data and content faster than ever before -- that was my experience. And we've come so far so fast. Everything is more fluid and transparent --- software creation and distribution; collaboration and communication; data and content exchange and publishing. It's good to step back and pat our industry (and in particular the hero developers and cottage companies that are the real innovators) on the back now and then. [from Jeremy Allaire's Radio]

Blogging directly from Mozilla

Thu, 28 Nov 2002 15:33:23 GMT

I've been trying to blog within Mozilla via mozblog; however, I can't even get the darn thang installed on Moz 1.2. Now that the Mozilla Calendar project has shown me that you can do some pretty nice things by extending Mozilla, I'm turning my attention to blogging via Mozilla. Since mozBlog is not working (yet), I checking out some other paths. Following pearfear's advice, I have installed protozilla and will check out his very cool demo of RSS goodness within a browser. I also need to slightly grok XUL. Here's where I'm heading: since the Calendar project already demonstrates the concept of creating/editing multiple items, sorting them in several views (day/week/month), saving this data locally, and posting them remotely, wouldn't it be possible to hack the Calendar code to create a nice blogging tool? Would a calendar-based user interface work for blogging?

MVC still doesn't cut it

Thu, 21 Nov 2002 13:58:56 GMT

I spent a while trying to get MVC to work alongside fusebox, and I found it to be too complex. I think that learning about MVC has been useful to my approach to web application development, but it is probably just one of many interesting influences during my growths as a developer. The analysis of MVC in Template Tookit Vs HTML::Template sums up a desirable approach for web development:

What the MVC-for-the-web crowd are really trying to achieve is a clear separation of concerns. Put your database code in one place, your application code in another, your presentation code in a third place.

Calendaring in Mozilla

Tue, 19 Nov 2002 09:47:39 GMT

Lately I have been turning my interests to improving the tools available for sharing information for the web. At the moment I am testing the process of posting events to a website. Mozilla has a Calendar project that is beginning to show promise. It is a nice example of open source software development. The calendar does your basic local calendar operations - recurring events, alarms, day/week/month views, but it is buggy and a tad slow. But it's free and is being actively developed. And most importantly, I am able (fairly easily) to post a calendar file to my website to which other Mozilla calendar users may subscribe. I have published a help file for publishing calendar events (via FTP) to a website. Right now this process publishes only an XML-formatted file; next I will research transforming this data to html. (horde's kronolith seems to be ready to do such a thing in pHp.) If you are using Mozilla calendar, you may subscribe to my public calendar.

Intranet Usability: The Trillion-Dollar Question

Tue, 12 Nov 2002 09:09:36 GMT

I've always been a fan of Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox site because he focuses on an area that often suffers in web design: usability. This article on Intranet usability resonates for me because I recently hooked up a client's remote office to their network (via VPN), enabling them to access their intranet.

Ektron eWebWP

Tue, 29 Oct 2002 17:21:01 GMT

A FlashMX-based WYSIWYG text editor. I played with one of the demos - web-based e-mail client - they need to have a view source function in the demo 'cause I am curious what kind of html it generates. I wish their GUI was a bit more *fun* - I mean, this is flash!

The Avalon Project

Fri, 25 Oct 2002 17:02:53 GMT

Avalon Project - "The Avalon project is an effort to create, design, develop and maintain a common framework and set of components for applications written using the Java language." The Component Lifecycle bit is very interesting - links to OOP best practices, patterns, and other good stuff. Disciplined programming!

Getting closer to blogging with a killer GIU

Fri, 25 Oct 2002 07:53:10 GMT

WYSIWYG Blogediting. "I'm almost done integrating Xopus in CocoBlog" [...] [Be Blogging] "CocoBlog is a free weblogging software tool based on Apache Cocoon and Apache Xindice." Xopus is simply amazing.

TTW WYSIWYG Editor Widgets

Sat, 19 Oct 2002 13:38:47 GMT

Great list of WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get" ) editors that can be applied to Content Management Systems.

Ekit

Thu, 17 Oct 2002 10:00:50 GMT

"Ekit is a program & applet that uses the Java 2 libraries to create an HTML editor. The Ekit standalone also allows for HTML to be loaded and saved, as well as serialized and saved as an RTF. It is approaching its first production release version." I wonder how Ekit is being used with content management systems? If it could hook it *easily* within my current CMS, I would use it. It does all the basic stuff pretty well - text styling, cut/paste, tables, etc.

XML::Comma

Wed, 16 Oct 2002 08:46:39 GMT

While checking out Allafrica.com's website, I noticed that it is powered by a perl-based open source content management system called XML::Comma. Content is created and stored as XML files, and then indexed by a relational database such as mysql. Nice approach that is quick and easy to maintain. And it's perl!