Ayalike: Content Management using Catalyst
UPDATE: The demo and trac links are down atm, as Ayalike is being moved to new hosting.
I’ve been hacking away for the last week or so on a content management system (henceforth CMS). We are going to need a CMS for some future $work projects and I’m generally unhappy with all that I’ve reviewed. So many of the existing ’solutions’ seem to be more in the business of providing you with a ‘platform’. Most of the folks I know build platforms for a living, we need only find a way to manage the content.
So with that in mind, Ayalike (pronounced like ‘a uh like’) aims to provide the following features:
- Multisite, multiuser, multirole
- Output agnostic
- Versioning
- Pluggable publishing
- Output processing
Three of those features are complete. Publishing works, but is currently not pluggable. Output processing is there as well, but I’ve yet to hook it into anything but unit tests.
That’s all kind of abstract, here’s what I’ve done in a more concrete form: This week I modified one of our internal applications to use a custom Template Toolkit provider that communicated with Ayalike and provided ‘preview’ functionality on the live site without changes to the application itself. The application functioned normally, rendering compiled templates from the filesystem, unless given a special parameter. In that case it requested the entry from Ayalike over HTTP using it’s wiki-esque page viewing feature. Obviously real apps would protect this feature with logins.
I’m not quite ready to tout it on the mailing lists or in IRC yet, but I’m very excited about the project and I hope that it might become the solution for my future work projects. Regardless, Catalyst needs a CMS.
Are you interested? Visit the Trac site. There’s even a working demo, cleared every half hour.
Comments (6 comments)
Please give us the login data from your cms demo.
jan / February 7th, 2008, 2:22 pm / #
http://trac.oneforthehustle.com/ayalike/wiki/Demo
gphat / February 7th, 2008, 6:16 pm / #
I am not convinced that frameworks are such a bad idea!
At the company I work for, they standardized on Sharepoint, and I looked in the FOSS world for anything better, but didn’t
Sharepoint is beast, with all the content management features you need. I in particular like their Lists and Customs lists features.
Contents comes in differents types and shapes, and most website, need Portal like features (security, logs, etc … ) so sharepoint is now like the one ring to rule them all webportal for everything microsoft, you can post and create all sorts of content on it
Finally, in the open source world the one thin I found that can really compete is Xwiki (xwiki.org) check it, I think you might like it.
The things with frameworks is, you dont need to re-create common features, most of the features you mentioned are common to many application needs, why recreate them!
I recommend you review xwiki and sharepoint closely to get few more pointers
Ali / March 6th, 2008, 2:10 pm / #
I believe your misunderstood my post as somehow bashing existing CMSes. That’s not my intention. I’m simply not interested in jumping through the hoops required by what’s out there. My needs are very simple and so is my solution.
The only way people get a better wheel is by reinventing it from time to time.
gphat / March 7th, 2008, 8:12 am / #
would like to take a look at how the model and business logic are done. but can’t access oneforthehustle.com.. can i get a tarball? thanks.
Qiang / May 6th, 2008, 6:26 am / #
Both Trac and working demo links seem to be broken. Is there an update?
Dan Dascalescu / May 7th, 2008, 3:21 am / #
Post a comment