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Stephen Van Dahm

http://vandahm.org/

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Writing a new CMS

Posted by Stephen on February 28, 2007 in Programming

Tonight, I’ve taken the first steps towards ditching WordPress and rolling my own custom CMS. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, and I’ve always dismissed it on the grounds that it’s too much work and time, and that there’s already a ton of blogging software out there. But the truth is, I don’t want a blog, or at least I don’t want my site to look like a blog and be organized like a blog. Basically, I want to use my website to publish a few different kinds of things:

• basic information about who I am and what I do.
• links to all the cool sites I find, with commentary on why they I think they’re interesting.
• digital pictures
• code snippets that I’ve written and collected.
• longer article-length posts on different subjects that interest me.

Each of these types of content needs to be presented in a different manner, so simply creating new categories in WordPress isn’t the answer. Installing n separate applications to cover all these bases might work, but then I’ll be stuck with n different sets of user accounts, n different admin interfaces, and n different sets of HTML templates. I’ve done that before, and I don’t want to do it ever again. I’ve also tried hacking WordPress and Movable Type to accommodate these different roles, and it sucked, and I don’t want to do that ever again, either.

Besides, I’m a programmer and I want to program stuff.

I’ve decided that, for this project, I’ll use the Python language and the Django web framework. I thought about using this opportunity to learn Rails, but I’ve already got a project in mind for that. I’ve loved Python since my college days, and Django is an awesome framework for rolling your own CMS.

Since I’m writing this on the evenings and weekends, it will be a while before the new system launches. Until then, I’ll still be using WordPress.