Livecode Content Management System

[Ralf Bitter]

Hi Alex,

here are my offhand and fairly blunt thoughts on your undertaking.
First of all I think that the primary challenge in building a CMS, no matter
if you use LiveCode, PHP or whatever, is to provide a tool for an audience
which is not that tech-savvy.
So, the process of managing web content should be made extremely
simple. In my opinion to achieve this goal it is crucial that the CMS
allows for most of the tasks inline editing in a very convenient way.
But all this means that the front-end is not less important than the
back-end and besides developing the back-end using LC, based on
revIgniter or not, one has to be prepared to write a lot of JavaScript code.
Personally I was thinking about developing a CMS for quite some time
but stayed away from doing it because it is such a huge task and
because it would not pay my bills.

Regarding Bootstrap: I like Bootstrap but in times of flexbox and
CSS grids I have a slight feeling that Bootstrap could become more
and more dispensable for your purpose, especially as you mentioned
that you try to reduce complexity.

Ralf




> On 1. Dec 2017, at 02:56, Alex Tweedly via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> 
> So, I've decided to build LCMS - a Livecode Content Management System.
> 
> It will be (very loosely) based on what I think are the useful ideas in Wordpress (but without any tendency towards blogs). It will be relatively simple.
> 
> It won't be:
>  - smooth, slick and all-powerful like WP
>  - able to support (initially, and for some time) real independent development of themes, plugins, auto-loading and updating, etc. etc. (yada, yada, yada ...) - that might be done in a few [= 2 to 20 years]
> 
> It will be :
>  - based on Livecode (and extensible in LC)
>  - (I hope) simple and easy (for a LC developer) to understand, use and extend
>  - complete with at least one complete theme (based on Botstrap)
>  - (at some point) open source, on github, etc. under MIT liceense
>  - documented in some old-fashioned way (i.e. written, searchable, skimmable tutorials - few or no Youtube videos to waste your time)
> 
> OK - enough of the advertising pitch :-)
> 
> Here are the requests for input ....
> 
> 1.  has anyone tried this before ? and did you succeed ?  or why did you stop ? any foreseeable problems to contend with ?
> 
> 2. am I just tilting at windmills and I should just go back to studying WP and its plugins ?
> 
> 3. the current prototype is based on (or rather 'is written over' revIgniter).
> 
> I have very conflicting opinions of revIgniter
>     + it's wonderful, it has a huge quantity of things it "just does" (in a well documented, well tested, etc. way)  so that I don't need to think or learn about them, etc. - I love it.
>     - (a) it is intimately tied to LC server, with heavy dependency on 'include' so it's impossible to (as I would want to do) test 99% of my code in the IDE, with debugging etc. help.
>     - (b) I *really* dislike the "rigLoadView" scheme - it forces (or seems to force) far too much co-mingling of code and content within the view files, and has no clear way to use "themes"
> 
> The current version of LCMS simply ignores the 'View' (and 'Model') part of revIgniter, and generates all its output based on  ''pages' and 'themes'  (and 'menus') - but it sill benefits from all the other parts of revIgniter).
> 
> do you think it would be worth the (considerable) effort needed to remove the dependency on rvIgniter in the hope of benefiting from the reduced complexity, hopefully lower overhead, easier debugging a higher percentage within the Ide, etc. ?
> 
> Thanks for any suggestions, input, etc.
> 
> Alex.