~Sterling Rebuilt, Contentment.org online

Neat. ~Sterling has been rebuilt using the latest CMS to take the Open Source world by storm...er something. Okay, so the "secret" project I've been working on for years is finally doing something because I decided to stop being "elegante" and decided to JustMakeItWork(tm).

What have I done? Well, I wrote a little tool to help me manage the CIS Support Site for work. This little tool is a combination themer/indexer for static pages. It also does some on-the-fly generation of HTML from reStructuredText, which is what we write most of our docs in. It seemed pretty useful and is similar to the software I was using to run this site before October 2004, called Blosxom, which is a lightweight file-based blogger.

Anyway, when I had some trouble getting access to K-State Online for my course last semester, I decided to try and dump my course data into it on ~Sterling. With a few modifications it worked quite well and quickly supplanted any previous ideas I had about the content management systems I'd been toying with for the past several years.

Most of the work is already done by HTML::Mason. My system just took advantage of the features already present to add indexing and theming and generation of content from other formats. ~Sterling took it a bit further by adding the ability to generate even more complicated content (especially, ripping apart zipped Keynote "files" and using XSLT to generate HTML outlines).

At this point, I ran into a few issues:

1. Adding new generators was requiring lots of custom code and my indexing code was becoming convoluted.
2. New content had to be added with care, otherwise Mason would try to interpret files it had no business touching. When this happened, my indexer would basically bring the entire site to it's knees with a single exception.
3. Some content is just better stored in a database. Blog entries, news items, and simple records are just a few examples. The system had no way of coping with any of these.

Thus, since about the time I put Drupal on this site, I've been working on a replacement. Drupal is merely a temporary expedient. I started completely from scratch, but have dragged in a lot of the bits from the existing "knowledge base" system to build this new system, which I am dubbing as Contentment (superceding all the predecessors I'd created and called this).

This system currently features a lot of unused features, but most of the good ones are employed currently. One of the best features I just added this week and after just a few days it's practically remade the quality of the system. Specifically:

1. It features a (largely unused, as yet) forms handler that can help design forms and wizards with a fairly small amount of effort. I borrowed a lot from the kinds of work that Everything has done in this area.
2. It uses the SPOPS object-mapping system to provide a database API. It's not required that new plugins use this API, but all the existing database pieces use it.
3. The system automatically provides for context, sessions, and logins. The user accounting system is completely pluggable, so new support for LDAP or other login types could be added with a little effort.
4. The system provides a basic permissions system. All of these features have been designed to make adding database-based plugins possible, but there really aren't any yet.
5. The major feature that has really made the system work despite the lack of any database plugins is the VFS system I've put together. I've debated whether or not this should be forked into a separate project, but I'm going to leave it where it is for now. Anyway, this enhances Mason's abilities by quite a bit and allows for a much more general way of looking at files. This way, Mason no longer has primary control of generating files, but passes that control off to other plugins.
6. Right now the system works via CGI, but I'd like to put together a mod_perl front-end to take advantage of those features. I've designed everything to this point with mod_perl in mind, so it should work with minimal effort.

That's a pretty bad mish-mash summary of the features. There's a lot more I could say, but I'll save that for documentation. I'm going to admit that I've had a SourceForge project for this for eons, but that it'd never really worked until now. I'm so excited about how this is going now, that I have registered Contentment.org and will be posting information and documentation there. I'm going to, for now, use the mailing lists, bug trackers, announcements, and CVS repository at SourceForge. (Though, I'm hunting hard for a way to keep it in Subversion as I strongly prefer it, despite it's performance and other issues.)

Anyway, I wanted to announce that and say that Drupal may be saying farewell to this site soon---if I can get the plugins written and translate all of my Blosxom and Drupal entries into my new plugins.