I just got an email announcement for Amazon’s new CloudSearch service. This could be really cool if popular applications and frameworks like WordPress, Drupal, Rails, and Django build modules/apps/extensions that interface with CloudSearch. It would be nice to have an alternative to Google Custom …

Localization can be an elusive requirement for a website. During the platform selection process, internationalization is often listed as a “strong” requirement. Why wouldn’t you want the ability to reach new markets? Then, during the implementation process, localizing gets downgraded as a …

In the old days, static publishing (or baking, where the CMS generates static HTML files at publish time), was pretty much the standard. Most of the WCM products on the market did static publishing: Interwoven, Tridion, RedDot, Percussion …. Even the frying systems like …

My former colleague Lukas Kahwe Smith recently gave me a update on what is happening with the PHPCR initiative. Readers of this blog might remember me make a brief mention of PHPCR and the Jackalope implementation. My initial response was that I was unsure …

Over the past year I have been doing some side work building a web application for a startup. The project has been very interesting and the process has helped me stay in touch with my inner developer. It has also allowed me to practice agile …

One of the main benefits of using a coupled (aka “frying”) web content management system (WCMS) is that you get a web application development framework with which to build dynamic content-driven applications. Like nearly all modern web application development frameworks, a coupled CMS provides …

Search is probably the most common visitor-facing requirement in web content management system implementations. Usually the requirement is written in terse form such as “basic search” or “advanced search.” But there are many nuances that need to be accounted for. There are essentially two …

There is a great Reddit thread on The Onion’s migration from Drupal to Django. The Onion was one of the companies that I interviewed for the Drupal for Publishers report. One of the things I mention in the report is that The Onion was running …

Around thirteen years ago, I helped build a prototype for a custom CRM system that ran on an object database (ObjectStore). The idea isn’t quite as crazy as it sounds. The data was extremely hierarchical with parent companies and subsidiaries and divisions and …

Another geeky post…
In my last post, I described the relative merits of managing configuration in a repository vs. in the file system but excluded presentation templates even though how they are managed is just as interesting. Like configuration, presentation templates can be managed in …