This wasn’t supposed to be a full redesign. And really, it isn’t.

But the time had come for me to say goodbye to the home-brew CMS that was running this site. It was instructive to create a basic CRUD system from the ground up. But its been neither educational nor interesting attempting to bolt additional features onto it, when I had little idea what I was doing at the outset.

It’s silly to spend large amounts of time implementing what’s already been done many times over in open-source packages.

Typo, what’s that?

Yes, I’m running Typo. It’s a Rails application, which is sort of cool. But more importantly, it’s got a small codebase, and a sane database layout.

Until very recently, I had assumed that I would be using Wordpress or Textpattern. However, as much as like them (especially Textpattern), I needed something simpler.

Wrong Purpose

I looked at Wordpress, but my feeling was really just that it “felt too much like a blogging app.” Well, of course it did, that’s what it’s for. This site is a blog, it would have made sense. But really, I want to learn a system that can be used as a general CMS– possibly on future client sites.

Wordpress has far too great a codebase for me to learn all its ins and outs if it’s only for this one site.

The true strength of WP is in the vastness of its community. But I’m just not the kind of guy who installs a zillion plugins just because I can.

Wrong Database

So I looked at Textpattern. I liked the concept of “sections” and “categories”, a highly logical approach to structuring a site. However, the way this is implemented at the database level is truly bizarre.

For the many-to-many relationship between categories (tags) and articles, every other system uses a bridging table. But not Textpattern. Textpattern has two fields, “category1″ and “category2″ in the article table, such that every single query on categories involves an awkward OR operation to check the both of them.

When I asked about this on their forum, I was told that data purity simply wasn’t that high on the developers’ priority list.

I didn’t really want to get myself too deeply into software where the developers are so busy adding features that they’re forgotten about an absurdity in their data structure that obviously crept in very early on.

Typo

Typo isn’t everything either. It’s as much blog software as Wordpress is. And it hasn’t got the beautiful “section” concept from TxP. But it’s reasonably simple, and a decent example of a Rails app, from which I can learn a little more about that whole thing.

So you see, this isn’t a redesign. It’s just the old style ported over. With… some changes.

In the end, I’ll probably learn Textpattern as my CMS of choice. But to run it on my sandbox blog site, I’d want to feel that the source is going to be sane enough that I can go hacking around it and not forget an absurd “OR” condition on a query.

Mike

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