robert hahn

a darn good web developer

September 28, 2006

Introducing the Yurt CMS Project

It’s with some pride, and a little humility (I hope) that I introduce my first OSS project to the world at large: the Yurt CMS.

In building this project, I drew upon a number of influences, such as blosxom, and my personal experience being involved in the development of 4 web content management systems (all of them proprietary), and building 2 more CMSs on my own (but never released). What I wanted to build was a CMS that required the least amount of infrastructure possible, and that hit the 80/20 point for building static web sites.

Ok, yeah, yeah, but what the heck is it? And does it use Camping?

The Yurt CMS is a web and console based content management system that has the following distinctive features:

No Database: Content for mostly static sites resides in editable files, not databases.
Version Control System Friendly: Web sites built using the Yurt CMS are easy to store in a version control system. This provides you with the ability to have an “unlimited undo”
Two-step deployment: Starting a new website is as easy as running a single command in the console, then updating your webserver configuration.
One-step go-live: Yurt CMS websites can be deployed simply by copying a folder.
No Chocolate in the Peanut Butter: This CMS is exactly that: a content management system. The templating is completely divorced from the system, so when you deploy your site, you’re not deploying any part of the CMS with it.

And yes, it uses Camping for the web based user-interface. Rejoice! Someone likes it and is using it for an actual, useful project!

Oh, and you didn’t ask, but there’s just one other dependency: BlueCloth. You probably already have them installed, so why don’t you download it and kick the tires?

Who would want to use this?

The Yurt CMS is designed for web developers who are building mostly static sites – I can certainly identify with this demographic, as that has been all I’ve doing for most of my career.

I’ve been constructing websites for a long time, and I have always advocated the use of content management systems to maintain them. Like many in the industry, I dreaded the drudgery that goes with maintaining sites, and figured that it would be easy to get the client to maintain their own site after I built it.

However, what actually happened was this: The site gets launched, the client gets training on the system, and then, the next time the client needed a modification done, they’d call on me or my team to make it happen.

I thought the problem was a failing or a flaw in the design of the CMS, and burned away lots of energy and time trying to build a perfect system. I now believe that maybe the reason the client wants me to do the work is because they trust me to do it right.

With that insight, I wanted to create a content management system designed to be as efficient to use as possible for web developers. I want to be able to save developers time and keep the quality high.

Ok, so is it finished yet?

Nope. I’ve got a few ideas to make this a lot nicer. What I wanted to do first though was to get something reasonably functional and bug-free enough for anyone else to try, and offer me some constructive feedback.