5 January 06 · Climbing up the walls

The long awaited site update is finally here. Commenting is enabled, the design has been tweaked and I have some much needed admin capabilities.

It all started a few months ago. I felt a growing need for comments and a better way to manage the site. At that stage I started looking at weblog/CMS software. Most of the stuff available either offered restrictive design templates, or was so complicated it required a masters degree in on-line collaboration software. In either case the software expected the user to conform to the way it thought sites should be designed. Not the other way around.

What I wanted was something where I could take my current site design, html and css. Then with a few definitions tell the CMS software where I wanted the articles and how to format them without having to make major design changes.

Not finding anything capable I started writing my own simple CMS. After a few weeks I had the basics going: mainly comments with some admin. I then managed to stumble upon TextPattern. I can't remember where I found out about it, but I think a button for it was lying inconspicuously at the bottom of some random blog. The name just jumped out at me and I had to have a look.

Anyway TextPattern was exactly what I was looking for. It was for all intents exactly what I was in the middle of writing! So I dropped the code I'd currently written and converted the site to use TextPattern.