A Better Content Management System

2011-11-10

I really tried to like mainstream content management systems. But they never lived up to their promises to make developing websites easier. They tend to be inflexible, overly complicated, buggy, broken, and have issues with data loss. Those "five minute installations" often require hours of my time. My clients still struggle with editing or adding content, which isn't as easy or intuitive as it is supposed to be. Further, the text editors produce unreliable, messy, and buggy markup.

Frustrated, I began looking for something better. After a lot of searching, I found Blosxom. Blosxom is a blog system consists of a single small perl script. To add entries to a blog, one simply uploads text files into a folder on one's server. Putting an entry file into a sub-folder assigns it a categories. Custom templates are HTML files containing a few special variables. Templates can be placed in subfolders to give entries of specific categories specific looks. For a developer like myself, Blosxom really is sublime.

Of course Blosxom isn't perfect. It doesn't support unicode characters. There is no way to make single-entry pages look different than multi-entry pages. You also can't specify publish dates for entries. It also isn't appropriate for most clients because content is uploaded via FTP.

Inspired I started learning Perl and wrote my own clone of Blosxom, adding the missing features that I needed. All this took little more than a week, working in my spare time. My entire website now runs on 150 lines of Perl script!