Where the DeployCMS project started…
Hi, my name is Anthony Blackshaw, I’m a director at Getme Web Solutions Ltd. in the UK, and one of the founding developers of DeployCMS.
My initial involvement in the DeployCMS project arose out of discussions I had with Nick Snell at Orpo (another founding developer) about a CMS framework I was developing early 2009 called Lupin. Nick worked with me on Lupin almost from the start, initially in a consultancy capacity and later on he developed some of the core Python libraries including the caching code.
In August 2009, Getme produced its first commercial website with Lupin. In the same month I attended a conference in Birmingham, UK with Nick. At a lunch break during the conference we went for a drink at a nearby bar, and on returning to the conference we found ourselves locked out with no one in sight of the entrance (not that it gave me a complex or anything). Finding ourselves in this predicament we returned to the bar and the topic of conversation turned to the little CMS framework Nick and myself were working on. We discussed what we liked about Lupin and what we didn’t like; even then it was obvious that Lupin wasn’t a complete system, it had lots of flaws that were inherent in its initial design. In particular it was too tightly coupled to one database wrapper, one template language, one Web server. But still, it was our preference over everything else we had access to, it had a small code base, was lightning fast, and most importantly was friendly to both developers and users.
So over a few drinks we ripped our own project, our 8 months of effort, to shreds in terms of what was wrong with it. When we were done there was still so much we liked about this little CMS framework, and so DeployCMS was born.
We decided to start from scratch; a complete re-write from the ground up, using Lupin as a guide to what needed to be changed and what already worked. Our roles changed a little; Nick became the lead Python developer, and for my sins I am now the lead JavaScript developer, though the roles aren’t strict of course.
So where are we 8 months later… well we’re behind or not quite finished which of course is the same thing, but we are close, and with over 30 commercial clients using the beta version of DeployCMS already we’re very happy with initial feedback. Over the next few weeks as we refine DeployCMS ready for launch we’ll be posting a lot more information about the project, its features, and progress.
Nick’s likely to post about the Deploy framework itself and the new DeployCMS website, as the Python code for DeployCMS is now at the final stages. I’m working on graphics for the default skin of the editor’s user interface and visuals for the DeployCMS website itself, and also currently finishing the page content editor so I’ll be posting some images and videos of the editing environment and discussing some of the cool features it offers.
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