I am hoping to start a couple of web projects this summer, sites that I hope to have up and running, and in the relevant search engines and directories by this fall. So, I thought it might be helpful to list some of the things I might need to get the job done.

Wish list:

- move away from tables based layout.
For as long as I can remember, I have been designing sites for the lowest browser version. But after analysing stats from my many sites, I have decided to instead look forward and pick a technology that is "standard" and will help remove the bloated code. Structural markup and a CSS driven layout are what I am currently looking into.

- sane content management
Editing tens or hundreds of html files everytime you wanna make a tweak and then uploading them all is definitely a thing of the past. Database and template driven sites are much more efficient. Having said that, most content management systems are just blogs. I am not going to be running a blog, I won't be posting news articles, I won't need much end user interaction in terms of comments, etc. So a big task is to find a REAL CMS.

There's more...but what do you guys think sofar? Any ideas?

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Div,
I am all for the use of CSS, especially when we are talking about the ability of mass manipilulation of the interface for users, including lesser abled people, which people forget about. Its also dead easy to change stuff once you get going.

Content management systems. Hmm, I've been hearing great things about Typo3, but it certainly isn't the easiest. I still don't get it really. PHPwebsite is another that seems to be praised and the one I use: mambo is really just a great simple little thing, but maybe too bloggish orientated for you, although it no way has to be. EZpublish 3 is good but needs developing since it has a speed issue so may be one to watch out for in a few months, but 2.27 is recommended for now. I hadn't heard until today about a CMS called Drupal which looks really good but it is still in beta and looks like a nice ahead of the times community.

Okay I'll stop there and see what you say

Another one to look at is Webgui, although it isn't open source. This one looks far more complicated and there are additions which are third party or purchasable.

You name a "CMS" and I have probably tried it

EZpublish is a too overwhelming (for me and probably my hosting account as well). Drupal seems best suited as a blog. WebGui was interesting, but uses Perl - and I am a little apprehensive hitching onto something that might be re-written in the future. Type3 looks interesting aswell, and I have have to check it out.

So far, the only good package I have found is Geeklog. I have hacked around in it to a point where it could theoretically do everything I want, but it uses really bloated html code. I would have to merge the CSS layouts from a blog like Nucleus and it might be ok. But Geeklog is coming out with a major version update so I will have to keep an eye on it.

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Typo3 looks quite good...the management screenshots rock. But the basic package was 6.35mb (zipped).

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Oh yeah that was the one thing that I forgot to mention. Its HUGE!.

I can offer no suggestions for a decent CMS - all this time I have probably only tried one (so long ago, I can't even remember the name anymore)...

As for the CSS / table-less layout, my personal opinion (at the moment) is that it is over-rated!

Maybe I am stupid or something but what would have normally taken a day to design, instead, took me nearly 3 weeks to do and that was just the main 3 columns!. Constantly I found, if it worked on IE, it didn't on Mozilla and vice-versa. So it was a lot of testing, tweaking and hair-pulling. Still, I don't know for sure if what I've written so far works in all the other latest browsers. Also, I couldn't help wondering why I had gone to all that trouble, just to have less HTML code? I would agree with CSS but table-less - I would suggest not.

That energy from 3 weeks of 'researching' and 're-learning' would have been better spent finishing the script/(application) instead. So my advise to you (if I can call it that) is for you to use what you know to get the site out first, then as an after thought, go back and try to change the layout if you want to go the table-less layout route... (of course, this will make a whole lot more sense if you're into the 'templating' stuff and writing your own CMS by then).

I think the last time I saw a Netscape 4+ browser being used to view this site, it was a single hit, last January!

Finally, if you're interested to learn something new before embarking on these projects, I would suggest choosing a 'template' script and figuring it out really well - that would make life a lot easier for you to make layout/design/html changes easily in the future.

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J de Silva
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The "structural markup and CSS" inspiration came after reading this article. Mind you, I don't expect to have the traffic and certainly don't have the resources of ESPN.com, but it did get me thinking.

I will be looking at a template engine like Smarty and CMS like Solmetra. They might fit the bill...

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How does one add content to a CMS? I mean, do you have to add HTML tags to your articles, news, stories, etc? Or are they somewhat similar to how one would post a message on a bulletin board (i.e. free of any HTML tags)?

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J de Silva
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You'd add your text, with formatting (could be html or proprietory) that might be required within the article. The rest is handled by the software.

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