Simple content management systems.

[Terje Bless]

Roy-Magne Mo <rmo at sunnmore.net> wrote:

>Mike A. Harris wrote:
>>I'm leaning towards doing the templating myself with raw perl.  The
>>HTML::Template looks possibly useful, but still exploring ideas...
>
>If you are looking in to HTML::Template, I would rather take a closer
>look at Template::Toolkit - it's in extras too.

Since we were speaking of “overkill” you mean? :-)


Mike; after reading this far in the thread I still don't have a real good idea
of what your actual requirements are. The ones you've mentioned — non-root,
lightweight, etc. — are very generic and not really specific to a “CMS” (gods
how I hate that term).


If you have “data”, and of which the most convenient form for you to manipulate
is a Perl data structure, then HTML::Template (or Template::Toolkit, I'm sure)
is a decent way to serialize it into various forms of markup (HTML::Template
isn't really specific to HTML).


If you want to edit your web pages directly from the browser, a home-brew CGI
giving you a text field or an FCK Editor[0] and some dead simple path/category
management (store files in the filesystem, not a DB, etc.), may be the way to
go.


If you're after some way to avoid the repetitive HTML code and just want to
write the meat of the page by hand, you could use Apache SSI.

Similarly, I'm currently looking at Blosxom (blog thingy) and it looks like it'd
work perfectly for something like that (without any actual blog bits involved);
edit pages as plain text, freely embed any markup you want, webspace paths
reflect filesystem paths, resulting output is fully templated, and you can
generate static pages from cron (or manually) instead of feeding every access
through a CGI. It's for blogging, but looks like it's sufficiently generic and
flexible to be adaptable to almost any task you want.

It's written in Perl, and seems essentially self-contained apart from templates
and such. No MySQL in sight. Blosxom's license[2] is...unusual though.


If you want to store data inside finished (X)HTML pages but still want to
manipulate that data, then using an XML Processor or an SGML Parser[1] to treat
the “page” as a structured data format should get you what you want.


And, you know, there's always the Red Hat CMS[3]. :-)



[0] — <http://www.fckeditor.net/>.
[1] — e.g. SGML::Parser::OpenSP, <http://spo.sf.net/>.
[2] — <http://www.blosxom.com/license.html>
[3] — <http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/cms/>

-- 
  “If at first you don't succeed, keep shooting.”  -- monk