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A web development company that I have worked with before has decided that they are interested in licensing a web-framework that I have developed. They are probably going to go forward and use it on a _lot_ of projects (well that’s certainly what I hope) and I will get a small cut each time they deploy it. I’m really super excited about seeing my code deployed this way, as well as by the prospect of passive income.

I also feel as if recently my code has taken a big step forward in quality. I’m not sure exactly what did it, but I suspect that it was either trying to write a good written word piece for the first time, or starting to do daily meditation. Either way my code quality has gone up in a visible and measurable way. I feel good about this because I just did another pass through the code base and feel like it’s getting much closer to something that could be licensed with real value.

Over the Last several days, have been pounding away on a CMS that really takes it’s inspiration from some of the work that Chris did for U-Penn. (It is also partially inspired by cake, and by joomla.) The idea is for the app to be as easy to install and use as is humanly possible. At the same time I expect that some more impressive things will need to be done by more advanced users, so I have sub-divided usage patterns out into 5 levels.

Installation: I’m hoping to get this as simple as possible. I took the time to write up a custom script “installer_helper.php” that drags the user kicking and screaming through the installation process. Hopefully this is enough, though a few steps still seem to hard. (Rather horrifically, the first one is the worst.)

Publisher: Hopefully this will be so easy that an ape could do it. You can either be logged in as an admin, or visiting the page. If you are logged in and visit a page that doesn’t exsist, you get the option to create the page, by selecting from a list of templates. The new page is automatically added to the master navigation. Each of the templates has areas of text, Images, and other sundry that can be edited by clicking on the little “edit” button next to them. Publishers will never need to touch the web server, or HTML.

Designer: New templates useing the smarty mark-up rules. Their are a few additional calls that can be made to put in editable fields, but for the most part it just straight HTML. The new template is simply deposited in the “view” directory, and then becomes an avalible option for the Publishers. Javascript, Images and CSS can all be put in their respective directories in “webroot”

Developer: If you need to add some actual functionality to the site, Brochure Ape can act as a rough and ready framework as well. Custom PHP code can be written, and put in files in the “controler” directory. At any point if a page is created that matches the name of a controller, it will run both the CMS code, and the controler code. There is also a pretty cool table-object that can be used to deal with specific database tables.

Extender: The ultimate idea is for the core code to be broken out into modules, which have been divided up sanely. Something a little bit more like a micro-kernal approch. At this point it’s just not true, and the extender roll would be a hard and unsupported one. I do however intend to keep on cleaning this up.

I just thought I would drop this little tidbit to help save someone some time (hopefully). In the smarty template engine there is a pretty useful call “register_prefilter” which basically lets you pass a function to smarty that gets run on the whole template file before the template file itself has any of the substitutions made to it. This can be a god-send, however the first time you use it it probably won’t seem like it’s working. The secret is that you need to go into your templates_c directory, and dump all of the compiled templates every time you change the pre-filter.