Livecode Content Management System

[Alex Tweedly]

Hi folks,

I'm looking for (initial) interest, previous experience, comments, etc.

Every few [ = 4 to 8] months for the last few [= 2 to 3] years, I've 
been either building a new website for someone, or making significant 
changes/enhancements to an existing one. Almost every time, unless the 
changes are very small, I've decided that I really *should* convert it 
to use a 'proper' CMS - e.g. Wordpress.

And I've tried - but every time I've foundered on not being able to get 
the site to be what I want, or realizing (believing?) that to do what I 
want requires real development skills within WP - and therefore too much 
of a learning curve and/or too much PHP.  Or, I've decided that to make 
it a bearable experience I need to use multiple add-ons (plugins, 
themes, etc.) and then found that the plugins I spent hours 
investigating and choosing were incompatible. Or were just not well 
enough documented.

[ I won't tell you how often I've found a (video) tutorial, wasted an 
entire hour or more watching it - then realized that it was for an 
out-of-date version of the plugin, or an old version of Wordpress, and 
that all the helpful screenshots showed me how to modify settings / 
actions that didn't exist, or had no obvious equivalent, in the current 
versions. ]

Twice, having run into brick walls with Wordpress, I've tried other CMSs 
(Concrete5 and ??Dolphin??) with similar results - poor / out-of-date 
docs have left me stranded - 80% of the way towards doing what I wanted 
and unable to get any further.

So in every case until now, I've given up, made tweaks / extensions to 
my own "home-grown" web site tool(s), and - so far - completed my 
enhancements in less time than I had wasted trying the "real" CMS.

I put that down to:
  - the power of Livecode
  - the power of revIgniter  (thank you ! again, Ralf)
  - my impatience in trying to learn new tools

But now I have a new, bigger opportunity / challenge - I've been asked 
to build a web site (actually two unrelated web sites) which are bigger 
and more complex, and for which I absolutely do not want to become the 
de facto on-going (content) maintainer.

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.