by Rob Chant on March 19, 2009
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
This is another thing I’ve been scratching my head about a bit recently. Renaissance provides full support for multiple site administrators (as well as users on the front end). It has the usual basic infrastructure one needs to have things working smoothly:
- Checkouts, to stop different administrators working on the same content at once
- Administrator roles, so one can differentiate between one’s SEOs and user managers
- Change logs, so one can see who updated what, when
- et cetera
There are also a few slightly more advanced tools (which I’ll go into in a second), but I’m really feeling a bit ignorant about what other packages provide (if anything) and a bit bereft of ideas for what I should be adding.
[click to continue…]
by Rob Chant on March 12, 2009
I’ve always been highly independent. I’ve worked in an actual job for all of one week in my entire life (and that was work experience at school). I deliberately know next to nothing about standard coding conventions and I love to re-invent the wheel, just so it can be my own kind of wheel. And the only psychometric test I’ve ever taken said, quite resolutely, “Don’t even think about trying to manage this person.”
With that in mind, I’m always kind of shocked to think about how client driven Renaissance’s development has been. I started it because a client asked for a CMS driven web site, and a huge number of its features, from core processes right the way across to little tweaks came from client requirements (I hate to admit it, but most of the features I thought up for myself rarely get used in comparison).
In fact, clients were even the driving force for Renaissance’s true raison d’êtra, flexibility.
[click to continue…]
by Rob Chant on March 5, 2009
My post about SEO last week got me thinking about just what a CMS ought to do for you, the web site manager or owner. With one of my many other hats on, I do a fair amount of business operations design, and I know that a decent system is what makes most business, large or small, sink or swim.
The same is true for the web today. Unless you’re putting together web sites purely for fun (which is probably a nobler endeavour than creating them for profit), there’s just a huge amount of management involved in running a successful, profitable web site (even just a small one!)
So, I got to thinking…
[click to continue…]
by Rob Chant on February 26, 2009
After all the malarkey and general polemic of the web 4.0 thing, I figure it time to return to business as usual with this blog. In other words, plenty of dry talk about CMS design, PHP and all that stuff.
My subject for today is SEO and CMS design. Before I begin, however, a very quick ramble. This blog is ostensibly about my own CMS, Renaissance, but that subject by itself would end up being pretty dry pretty quickly. Although I do tend to bring posts back to Renaissance at some point (or start them off with it), I’m really trying to talk about CMS and web application development in general. So discussion and feedback around the general topic is always welcome!
Anyway, SEO…
[click to continue…]
by Rob Chant on February 18, 2009
My previous post garnered a fair bit of attention and a reasonable amount of response in different channels. Quite a number of common themes and misunderstandings came up, so I thought I’d clarify and respond in one place.
So, first off…
[click to continue…]
by Rob Chant on February 17, 2009
[If you like this post, you might also want to read my follow-up]
Not so long ago, I published a post on rich media, which was really an excuse to rant a bit about how dull, boring and generic the web is (okay, I think it was more than a rant—I did at least attempt to put forth a reasonable argument).
The post was inspired by how lacklustre people’s expectations are when it comes to technology, and at its end, I promised a Web 4.0 manifesto.
Well, here it is.
[click to continue…]
by Rob Chant on February 7, 2009
An early design decision I made with Renaissance, when it moved from being a sloppy bunch of PHP files to a properly structured application (still in PHP) was to do with how the database is structured. I’ve pondered that decision a lot in the years since then, and have several times come close to going back on it and doing something entirely different.
[click to continue…]
by Rob Chant on November 25, 2008
Time for another feature post methinks! And a bit of chance for me to ruminate on some recent development work. That seems to happen so little at the moment that I love to have the chance to ramble about it…
[click to continue…]
by Rob Chant on November 18, 2008
I asked a question on LinkedIn* a couple of weeks ago, the answers to which started me off on a long, ranty chain of thought in my head.
Most of the answers were very good (a few were just okay or didn’t really respond to the question), so there was no problem there. My thoughts were really triggered by how the answers showed how limited people’s thinking is around web design and technology.
I’ll explain…
[click to continue…]
by Rob Chant on November 17, 2008
I’ve always been terrible at versioning software. Terrible. So terrible, in fact, that I’ve never done it. Renaissance is no exception. People have always exhorted me to do it, and, well, I guess I’m caving in…
[click to continue…]
