Content Management
The amount of activity surrounding the Django web framework since its not-quite release a few weeks ago is amazing. Adrian, Jacob and Wilson have been working over-time, with 395 check-ins to source c...
Ian Bicking has an interesting pieces on using static publishing in a CMS. The choice between static and dynamic when building software for the web is a critical one, and one that I think deserves in-...
Perls of wisdom in a sea of site mismanagement, via the ever-excellent Column Two:
The great surprise of the past five years of content management is that, despite all the hundreds of systems, no...
Launched today by Lindows, Nvu is a new project to develop a complete "web authoring system" (aka Dreamweaver/Frontpage style WYSIWYG editor) for the Linux platform. Reading around the marketing hyper...
Ideas in Technology and Publishing is a great new blog covering content management, XML and other publishing related technologies. It's less than a month old so it's still possible to read through the...
Here's one of the neatest tips for clean URLs I've seen yet, from Thijs van der Vossen. He's come up with a mod_rewrite rule that checks to see if the requested file exists if you add .html on to the ...
Don Park questions the benefits of emitting XHTML. In one sense, Don is right; publishing a whole site using XHTML in this day and age brings very little benefit and can cause a great deal of grief. B...
Textile 2 is now available for testing, courtesy of Dean Allen. Textile is one of the more popular structured-text style markup languages, which translate a simple markup language in to HTML. What mad...
This is pretty impressive: A Timeline of knowledge-representation that starts at the dawn of the Universe and continues through the whole of human history right up to the present day....
I've finally got around to adding a search page to this site. It uses MySQL's full text indexing, which is extremely fast and provides good results but comes at the expense of flexibility. Search term...
Last week I commented that Sam Ruby's spell checking feature could be made even funkier with the addition of a javascript powered "corrections" menu. I spent a few hours this afternoon playing with th...
[PHP|Post|myPHP]-Nuke has to be one of the most-forked open source projects in history! Xaraya appears to be a fork from Post-Nuke, which itself forked from PHP-Nuke several years ago (and I'm pretty ...
Sam Ruby has enabled spell checking for the preview comment tool on his blog. I wonder how it works... I've lost track of the scripting language Sam uses for Intertwingly (PHP? Python? Perl?) but I kn...
Building a Vector Space Search Engine in Perl:
Vector-space search engines use the notion of a term space, where each document is represented as a vector in a high-dimensional space. There are as...
I've finally enabled a subset of HTML in my comments. In doing so, I had several requirements that needed to be fulfilled:
Entered markup must be valid to XHTML strict, to stop comments form bre...
Here's a good reminder why you should always encode < and > as HTML entities when displaying content from an untrusted (i.e external) source: Kasia in a nutshell was hit by a false referrer cont...
Douglas Bowman has been having some amusing problems with robots and his calendar. The calendar, visible on every page of the site, automatically adds a "next month" and "previous month" link to allow...
This weekend I started work on my latest web project, further details of which will no doubt follow soon. For the moment I'll just say that it follows the classic news/articles/users with logins model...
Via Leonard Lin, a nice demonstration of an enhanced HTML text area (with buttons to add tags) that works in IE, Mozilla and Phoenix. Until recently this had not been possible thanks to a long standin...
Via Keith Devens, Screen-scraping with WWW::Mechanize describes how Perl's WWW::Mechanize module can be used to grab information from sites that require a user login. I've always dismissed screen scra...
MySQL Adds Subselects, Upgrades Performance and Security:
MySQL Version 4.1 includes support for SQL subselects, also called subqueries or nested queries, a powerful feature that lets users searc...
Not one, but three gems from James Robertson:
Looking towards the future of content management looks at the future of the CMS market over the next few years. James predicts that content management ...
Name your sections carefully (via Adrian) discusses how news (and other) sites could end up adversely affecting their content through badly chosen URL schemes....
Dorothea Salo has posted her thoughts on Semantic HTML as well. Dorothea points out that while pre-defined tags (paragraphs, lists and so forth) are well defined it is easy to run in to problems when ...
In repsonse to Mark Pilgrim's Poisoning the envelope, Brian Donovan has expanded upon his opinion that long term web facing content should not be stored as (X)HTML:
Do everything "right" (proper ...
Peter Merholtz has been thinking about collaborative software tools, and has concluded that the simplest are by far the most effective.
This will likely frustrate the hell of out big software vendo...
Adrian Holovaty eloquently demonstrates why real page titles (as opposed to titles stuffed with meaningless marketing keywords) are so important, using local entertainment listings as his example. One...
In Who dropped the deat cat into the well? (via Mark Pilgrim), Brian Donovan argues that keeping web site content in (X)HTML is a fundamentally bad idea. I thoroughly disagree. When I started this web...
I didn't take much notice of "funky caching" while reading through Rasmus Lerdorf's PHP tips and tricks presentation - I saw that it was talking about using custom 404 pages to serve up dynamic conten...
Licenses Down, Services Up is a fascinating article discussing the commoditising effect of open source software which uses the high-end Content Management market (such as Interwoven, BroadVision and V...
While reading the thread discussing Macromedia's Contribute over on 37signals I realised something: the web could really do with an open source Contribute style application. Editing full documents is ...
Rick Klau: A K-Log Pilot Recap:
Given the flexible nature of weblogs (unlike structured applications, weblogs really can be what you want them to be), it wasn't entirely surprising to see users sha...
Macromedia Contribute is a cut-down version of DreamWeaver designed for end content providers to add and edit content on a static website without fear of breaking the design. Coverage by Jeffrey Zeldm...
Dspace (via Swannie) is an open source platform that helps institutions archive, manage and distribute "digital works" over the long term. It appears to be a variant on the idea of a content managemen...
Jeremy Zawodny talks about URLs, and describes a recent internal Yahoo discussion over how the URLs for their stock tickers should work. His points in favour of short, simple URLs are particularly wor...
webgraphics have an interesting discussion running about the need for a weblog entry XHTML validator. Dave Lindquist suggests using his JavaScript XML Parser to perform validation on the client side, ...
It seems CMS news is like buses - nothing for weeks, then three items come along at once. Jeremy Zawodny has been very impressed by Bricolage, an Open Source CMS built on mod_perl, the HTML::Mason tem...
Adrian Holovaty has followed up his discussion of page titles on news article pages with a look at the oft-abused pull-quote. Adrian points out how pull quotes can lead to poor accessibility for text ...
Dorothea has posted two more excellent rants on the subject of ebooks, archiving and the importance of a single standard for master files (as opposed to a single standard for end user files which is a...
Moveable Type 2.5 is out. From the changelog:
Added TrackBack auto-discovery, which can automatically find TrackBack ping URLs based on permalinks in entry bodies. These entries can then be pin...
Brent Simmon's Law of CMS URLs:
The more expensive the CMS, the crappier the URLs.
The article includes an interesting comments thread discussing human readable URLs and why so many high end...
RSS 3.0 was a joke. ESF is serious, and is already getting a fair bit of attention from the blogging and syndication communities....
The Pingback 1.0 specification is getting some serious attention. Mark Pilgrim and Dave Winer have linked to it. Ben Trott (co-author of Moveable Type and creator of TrackBack, the system that inspire...
Flash Voodoo's Battle of the Flash Text Editor Components (via Jeremy Allaire) is interesting - the editors are all good, but they all suffer from the same problem in that the code they generate is pr...
A few days ago, I blogged the following:Imagine a textarea element that, when double clicked, spawned a brand new editing environment in a new window with all of the tools of a modern text editor. Or ...
Scott wants a rich text editor for Mozilla. What's more, he's willing to put his money where his mouth is and organise a fund drive to give developers a real incentive to do a good job.
At Incutio we...
DevShed have published two useful new articles - MySQL Connectivity With Python and Understanding SQL Joins. They also now provide nice looking printer-friendly PDF versions of articles, which appear ...
I spotted Mike Pletch in my referrals this morning. His blog has a clean, readable design and some great content, particularly if you are interested in information architecture and content management....
Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility:
Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site.
Show that there's a real organization behind your site.
Highlight the expertise in yo...
Quiet blogging day today, but I've been busy behind the scenes. Firstly I've been playing around with TaviWiki (an excellent PHP Wiki engine), using it as a proof of concept for a Wiki-driven small we...
xmlhack's "Editor's Newswire" is interesting. It is a small column (explained here) located on the right hand side of the site that displays the latest XML news snippets "in real time". The interestin...
An excellent list of open source content management systems (via Webdesign-L)....
I'm having trouble understanding the importance of workflow in a CMS. As I see it, managing content assets and controlling which assets are ready for publication can be thought of as two very seperate...
Dave Winer: The Two Way Web. The Two-Way-Web is a vision for the Web as an easy writing and publishing environment. This is an old essay from March 2001 (I only found it today) which describes a visio...
XFML - eXchangable Faceted Metadata Language (via Guide to ease). Now this is interesting. It's an open XML format designed to facilitiate the publication and distribution of metadata - it uses a load...
A couple of interesting threads on Slashdot today: Content Management Software - Build or Buy? and Properly Testing Your Code....
New buzzword (at least for me) - Knowledge Management. Apparently this is a theoretical corner stone of content management, an area I'm very interested in. Plenty of information about it in DMOZ as we...