Brian Rosenthal's Weblog

There are general topics that go in and out of fashion and have a positive effect on stock prices.

Oil, Healthcare, telecommunications, Internet, ERP / enterprise software, real estate, …

The problem is that it is easy to find the ones that are in fashion, but useless, because if you want to invest, you want the ones that are out of fashion.

Today, it’s energy and real estate, and we’re probably poised for a bubble in those markets.

But, you want to buy value, not things about to bubble, and I wonder how to find that.

Plone: An excellent cms. We would write a “cmsclient” class which would access the ZODB for content and possibly cache results.

Xaraya: Seems worth looking at. We would write a “cmsclient” class to access the xaraya database directly.

Midgard: Too heavy a footprint. Requires re-compiling PHP and adding lots of extensions. Spent two days trying to install it to no avail.

Our own CMS: Seems like a lot of work for a commoditized product.

Here’s the best option I’ve got so far:

Write a “cms client” class and manage the content in another, already built application.

The cms client would expose only a few methods:
1. get($id_or_path)
2. get_children($id_or_path)
3. get_parents($id_or_path) … would return the same as the PARENTS array in Zope.

Then, there could be different “cms clients” depending on what third-party content management software a user would use.

Well, prompted by Alan Runyan, co-author of Plone, we’ve been thinking a lot recently about Content Management lately.

Because E-commerce is more about content management than we originally thought.

If you take a look at some of the most successful e-commerce sites, you’ll find a lot of “content” (wine.com, proactive.com, etc.).

As much as these sites showcase a product catalog, they are far more about a lifestyle brand, and to effectively communicate that message, a company must have an easy-to-use content management system.

So, Robocommerce needs a content management system.

Well, we already have one. Our current strategy is to allow users to edit content via an ftp-style interface (Using WinSCP), where they have permissions over their content directory. That works fine for editing the site, but the approach has a few glaring gaps:

1. It does not support “properties".
2. It does not support sort order.
3. It doe not support titles for content.
4. It does not support content re-use.
5. It does not support an end-user triggering a commit into our version control system.

It’s strengths are:
1. It supports contextual editing (through a separate interface).
2. It leverages the file system.

In a future posting, I’ll outline the direction that we’re headed.