[albatross-users] Request for pre-specification enlightenment

[Max Romantschuk]

Hello boys and girls,

I'm new to the list, after having been convinced to bring my wraith upon you all
by Fabian Fagerholm (You're welcome, Fabian). We've decided to attempt building
a simple content management system to meet the needs of both our homepages. I am
aware of the fact that there are several out there already, but I'm doing this
for the fun of it.

I'm hoping the members of the list can help set me and Fabian on the right
track. Fabian has infinitely more experience with Albatross than I (as I have
none), but I have several years worth of experiece with building web
applications with Perl, PHP, ColdFusion, Zope and whatnot... We're hoping that
our combined forces will serve as a nicely contradicting bowl of ideas and
venomous snakes. This energy should eventually be channeled into some badass code.

Before I tell you about the requirements I'd like to point out that we wish to
build this system pretty much from scratch, using only the most generic of
pre-made building blocks. This may seem like a waste of time, but there's
nothing like really building a system from start to finish, in terms of learning.


Now, here's what we wish to do:

A simple content management system, consisting of two main parts. The site-view,
which is what all the nice users will see, and the admin-view, which we will see.

These two views need to show the same data, but in different perspective
(presentation versus content-creation).


The system should meet the following requirements:

There must be a simple but extendable authentication framework. I'd like to
start of with a simple authenticated/not model and work towards a Zope-style
monster model (see here:
http://zope.org/Documentation/Books/ZopeBook/current/Security.stx It's a good
read). I don't wish to get there anytime soon.

The system will use a simple tree-based approach to organize content. The tree
determines the navigation at the same time.

The tree approach enables some neat tricks to be done with relative ease. A
document can serve as a parent for images shown in the document. An image
gallery can serve as a parent for images shown in the gallery, etc.

There should also be a master-template showing the navigation and other global
stuff. An area of the master template is reserved for the actual content to be
displayed. The master teplate should therefore be able to switch the view in the
content area based upon context.

The following features are planned:
  Documents, consisting of XHTML-data
  Files and Images
  Weblog
  Image gallery


My current homepage is at http://max.nma.fi/ Feel free to take a look at what
I'm trying to replace.


I realize this description is vague, and that the approach I've envisioned may
not suit the Albatross environment. I therefore hope that the members of the
list can help us in finding a sensible approach, while still maintaining our goals.


Now then... bring on the hailstorm of bashing please.


.: Max Romantschuk
.: http://max.nma.fi/
.: http://www.mp3.com/romax/