I’m sure this will come as no shock
Tuesday, August 14th, 2007However, I’ve decided to write my own content management system. I debated about this idea for a very long time before deciding to sit down and begin designing one from scratch. Most CMS systems seem to be written from the ground up for a particular set of tasks, for some routine simple items this may work. IE: Wordpress manages any content I have in relation to my blog, and for the most part that content is simple. Couple of images, bunch of text; scheduling etc. However, i’m one person. With more than one person and lots more content, people want to do a lot of different things. This is where it makes sense to develop a framework such as the one that exist for Zope. You break down the most basic and required pieces of a total solution allowing the actual users to determine their workflow by being able to pop in and replace pieces as they see fit. Also, allowing communication between all the other pieces that they may need to manage their own content. I’m aware of framework hell but it’s clearly a better solution than not having one at all. I’m willing to hear arguments outside of that however if someone can sway me. Complete separation of services provided, application/web/scheduling etc.
A majority of this I haven’t figured out yet. I’m still debating on issues like if using ZFS directly is a good idea. Pushing things like the version system directly to the filesystem would be nice but as ZFS isn’t ubiquitous it would limit the scope of who is going to be using the system. I’ve decided on Postgres as it’s acid compliant and have begun designing the database schema. The other issue is actual content, meaning being able to use any sort of media and dumping it into one big repository; tagging that media with a subset information. This is probably the most important piece of the whole equation; management and tagging of the media. Also, the whole system should have a built-in stage mode. I’m pretty psyched about this though and it’s probably the only thing I’ve been psyched about in a long time. It’s a difficult issue content management; I’m reading a book now “Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy” by Ann Rockley, Pamela Kostur, Steve Manning that’s been pretty good so far.
Krang stuff
Krang::Category has a method that calls all of the stories linked with a specific Category and then returns all of the related story objects. This method doesn’t work however because of the way it’s implemented. I’m still investigating as I just stumbled upon this last night.
Update:Â Hi Chris –
> The method linked_stories in Category.pm is supposed to return a bunch
> of story objects relating to every story in a category.
I don’t think that is what this method is supposed to do. According to
the pod:
 “Returns a list of stories linked to from this category.”
The pod for this method should have been more clear about the meaning of
“linked.” As you observe, this method operates on the category element.
Unless your category element has a StoryLink element then this method is
a no-op. It would have been a heck of a lot more helpful if the pod
went so far as to say “if your element set has a category with a
StoryLink element…”.
That being said, this seems like a method which was developed to solve a
particular problem a long time ago, and wasn’t fully thought out. This
function could have easily been implemented in element set publishing
logic — no need to put it in the core API. If someone suggested this
method be added to the core today I’m sure there would be a chorus of
people saying exactly that.
Based on your email, it sounds like you need to be able to find all the
stories in a particular category. Is that correct? If so, that’s easy
enough:
 my @stories = Krang::Story->find( below_category_id => $category_id );
No photo stuff
Been a little lax on my photo stuff lately; time has been short as anyone who knows me can attest to. However fall is around the bend so once those leaves start turning should be a good time for me to take it all in.
SCO
Why is anyone surprised the stock has tanked? It’s really a non story however everyone is reporting on it like it’s this big thing.
Range
Went to the range this weekend. A little shooting helps calm the mind 
There was a very used SA58 but very accurate considering; there are really no good qual ranges in the new york city area. If anyone knows of one in New Jersey or in the state of NY/Pennsylvania let me know.