Let's Try This Again
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I’ve been on an endless quest to find the (mostly) perfect content management system (CMS). I’ve tried a number of solutions — Blogger, WordPress and others — but none of them have been elegant and standards based. I recently found what I was looking for with TextPattern. It took me a little while to figure out how everything worked, but once I figured it out, everything made sense.
I experimented on some test sites and then implemented it on a simple probono site. Everything went smoothly, so I decided to finally rebuild jonhenshaw.com with it. Similar to the other experiences, it was incredibly easy to build my site, and even easier to manage it.
There were two plugins I found very useful:
The hak_tinymce is an excellent replacement for Textile or writing my own HTML. I use SimplePie to parse RSS feeds into lists.
The layout and colors were heavily inspired (borrowed) from kuler, Adobe’s very cool color scheme tool. So if the copy police come after me, I’ve already admitted my wrongdoing.
Another cool technology I’m using is sIFR 3. sIFR lets me use whatever font I want using Flash and JavaScript. It’s also search engine friendly, so I can continue to use semantic markup.
How much will I post on this site? I don’t know. I prefer for it to be organic. I’ll post when I feel like and I’ll write whatever I feel like writing. The best way to be updated is to subscribe to my RSS feed.
