thaBadDawg’s Musings

I’ve been developing a CMS over the past several months to handle what will end up being a multitude of sites inside of APX. At the moment WebCore (the internal name of my CMS) is a ASP.Net MVC application. Somewhere in the future, to improve my skills with other languages, I’ll be doing either a Ruby or Java port of WebCore so that I can do Linux based installations as well. To put through WebCore through it’s paces we launched APX Gives Back on it. In terms of complexity, the site isn’t at all pressing the boundaries of what WebCore can do, but it helped me work out the kinks of the system enough to launch a full featured site.

Two weeks ago we set the new and improves APXAlarm.com lose on the world which for me is a minor techincal marvel. I’ve never written a CMS before and now I have one that, when finished, will be as robust as Joomla, WordPress, Umbraco, and a dozen other great CMS packages, but one that can accept data driven content from whatever angle I want to throw at it. APXAlarm.com actually uses two different data driven packages that plug in very nicely to the system. First is the Stories engine (been done 100 times before on every blog engine ever made) that allows the story’s content to easily plug into the template of any page. The second is a Products engine which takes a product’s details and makes it so that the content is easily formatted.

Not being a designer (and when you look at APXAlarm.com you’ll notice a beautiful design) I wanted to make a system that made it exceptionally easy for designers to do their work. I have to give a lot of props to the developers of StringTemplate for putting together such a robust templating package that can handle anything I throw at it. The design element of WebCore makes it so that any designer with a basic understanding of HTML can do what they want to and still have an incredibly powerful, data-driven site back up their work.

I’ve got quite a bit of hacks to pull out of WebCore and replace them with an even more comprehensive functionality, and as time goes on even the most robust CMSes out there will pale in comparision. All from little ol’ me. (All 280 lbs of me that is). Check it out… www.apxalarm.com is a FANTASTIC site. Plus, mad props to my partner in crime, Heber Eastman who put together the look and feel. I’m a developer, not a designer. Without him that site would look like crap and I’d have a WebCore that could do amazing things with nothing to show for it.