Long-overdue update on our CMS open-sourceage
Earlier this year we announced that we were open sourcing our CMS. Yes, we announced it in March. Yes, it is now almost July. Here’s an update on what’s happened since then and what we’re planning to do.
First, I want to clarify that we still plan on open sourcing our CMS. Our delay in getting it out there has nothing to do with us changing our minds.
When we were deciding whether to take the leap and open source our CMS, the question we kept asking ourselves was: If there was a CMS that was already out there that did what we wanted it to do, would we use it? We originally built our CMS because we couldn’t find an existing one that did what we wanted it to do – at least not an affordable one. But we’ve always been on the lookout for something that we could leverage instead of it all being custom.
Since we made that initial post announcing the open sourcing of our CMS we found a new platform which has a lot of the blogging functionality that our CMS didn’t have yet, is very flexible in terms of the design, is easy to customize and extend, and is fast. The flexibility in terms of the code has allowed us to integrate the important pieces of our current CMS into it.
We’re currently transitioning our existing functionality to this platform and will then open source core components of our CMS that integrate with the new platform. This will actually be easier for a CU to deploy and will provide more functionality.
We’re shooting for a late-summer deployment of our first site on this platform and will release the core components shortly after. If we haven’t given you real code by the Partnership Symposium in October then I give you permission to kick me in the ankle.




JV on June 27
Will there be any workflow tracking functionality, or is this more of a publishing platform?
Robbie Wright on June 27
Don’t worry, we’ll kick you in the ankles! And I’m assuming it is built around RoR?
Matt Dean on July 03
JV, we don’t currently have any workflow tracking planned other than being able to save content as a “draft”. Do you have any specific use cases in mind?
Matt Dean on July 03
Robbie, yes it’s built around RoR (Ruby on Rails for our non-techie friends). We’ve launched several sites on Rails over the past year and it’s definitely become our platform of choice.
Have you messed around with Rails at all?
JV on July 05
The workflow issue around here has to do with routing new/modified web content and the tracking thereof. The solitions that do this cost more than our dept. head wants to spend.
I’m still curious to see what you’ve put together.