I stum­bled across this PHP5 CMS today (via a WSG mem­ber post) and it looks pretty good. I’m a lit­tle con­cerned about the (very)-AJAX admin side of things, but didn’t spend much time dig­ging into it so it might grace­fully degrade (maybe).

It’s almost frus­trat­ing to find such good and mature CMS prod­ucts on the mar­ket and not have any need to use them for CYIADA… I spent the last week mostly try­ing to shape fairly sim­ple data mod­els for dif­fer­ent aspects of the web­site and it’s rapidly becom­ing clear just how struc­turally com­plex multi-tiered community/community gen­er­ated con­tent sites are. At least in terms of rela­tional DB com­plex­ity, yes, this is big­ger than MySpace.

Any­way, Sil­ver­Stripe looks worth a look for sim­pler endevours.

The com­plex­ity is mostly intro­duced where users become authors, which defies tra­di­tional CMS work­flow alto­gether. It’s also far more struc­tured than Wiki sys­tems are, and far more pri­vate. Pri­vacy is being bal­anced against flex­i­bil­ity which is being bal­anced against com­mu­nity and all of these are being met with time/cost concerns.

But I like to keep telling myself I don’t really know what I’m talk­ing about and get­ting a pro­gram­mer will solve all these dilem­mas … yeah, right.

I’ve got sick of sit­ting on my hands and just want to be a web prac­ti­tioner again. I know the prod­uct inside out, it’s been planned to the hilt, stake­hold­ers are uni­ver­sally intrigued/waiting for it, and I’m being impa­tient and feel­ing gen­er­ally like charg­ing for­wards. Which is, in all prob­a­bil­ity, not the best way to be approach­ing things.

These two con­sul­tants came in a week ago and we explained the project to them and (what I heard was) they said “we want flow­charts and scope doc­u­ments”. I’ve killed a few trees in my time, but the next per­son to help me in that isn’t going to be a con­sul­tant telling me to rehash (yet again — I’ve writ­ten doc­u­ments in so many forms, web­site copy so many times, etc.) what I’ve got with­out any fur­ther input. I’m in this weird place now where wait­ing for a pro­gram­mer is nearly required for fur­ther plan­ning action, and every­one but me appears to want more plan­ning before action… mean­while, I’m writ­ing mod­els for Django and scar­ing myself with the com­plex­ity and learn­ing Adobe prod­ucts bet­ter and gen­er­ally land­ing squarely back in front-end ter­ri­tory, which is where I’ve com­fort­ably been for the last two or so years. Well, with the excep­tion of Adobe prod­ucts, which I only finally caved to last year… what­ever :P