I pretty much stopped the blogging tear I was on because I began this “job” redesigning a website from top to bottom for a person who posted an ad on Craigslist… I thought it was going to be just another page redesign romp, but oh no, they wanted to keep their CMS.
They had the temerity and the tenacity to want to be able to edit their own content..gasp gasp. Luckily I wasn’t totally ignorant of the concept of a CMS because I’d been rooting about for ages for such a thing for myself.Because me likey.
Anyway-don’t you love it when the client asks for stuff and has no idea what they are asking for? I do. I mean ,they haven’t got the slightest glimmer of a clue of how web development/webdesign works. But they’ve been lusting for a site like such and such and so and so and they send you links to these awesome sites and ask you to make one like that.I was all like “ok I can”(right) until he said but I want to be able to edit the content and change pictures,too.
I think I almost fell over. I knew enough about CMS’s to know that they all are like totally married to MYSQL and I’ve not yet had a first date with MYsql, myself.That’s ok I have the poor man’s version of a database the old text file flat file method.Not that I quite know how all that fopen fclose fread stuff works but I know a little.A little knowledge is not so dangerous in this case.Also I am aware of safety. I know that’s why everyone uses MYsql to store data because it takes an automatic login to get in,ehem. But there’ve been flatfiles since the dawn so there are also folks making safe flatfile CMS.They have logins that get encrypted.And hopefully the host the site is on will have safety measures of it’s own. Ok, so I found a thing called doop.It’s small and friendly and brand new, having been only released this year(it’s only February,too).
The upside to all this newness is that they are really into developing it,and it’s getting upgraded all the time.The downside is that it’s so new that hardly anyone uses it so the forum is skimpily populated and there isn’t much support.Personally I’d be lost without it because it’s exactly what my client wanted. He had a mysql connected CMS but it was making certain parts of his content unwritable(read only)
so certain things couldn’t be edited.I was writing to the guy’s webmaster and he was really accomodating.He even set up a brand new wordpress because I was going to use that as a new CMS.But it turned out to be way too much power after all.We don’t need all those bells and whistles! doop works off of just one file.It does everything after installation.It lets you make as many pages as you want.And you can automatically create links to these pages with a tag like <?menu null()?>. It was a bit of a bitch to figure out how all of this worked because all the while designing and plotting the layout I had to keep in mind that it had to be edited by mr client later on.So I couldn’t go too crazy.
I ended up with the new site
his old site
Which is nicer? His old site has a cool collapsible vertical menu
with subpages. Doop hasn’t gotten around to subpages yet.Although, there was a girl in their forum offering to send people her modified version of doop with subpages built-in but when I wrote to her and asked for it she never wrote back.And she hasn’t come back to the forum since.
oh well.