I’m posting this via the WordPress app for BlackBerry, let’s hope this works.

Here’s the resulting sample sites:

Drupal Test

I evidently was absent the day they talked about Drupal, because I found this CMS to have a lot more depth than I remembered. That, or version 6 is leaps ahead of 4.x and 5.x. I was able to take the Zen theme and customize it however I pleased, and used the standard Contact module for the contact page. I learned an important thing in customizing a Drupal theme – set the administration theme to something different in case you fubar you layout somehow. Other than that, it took only a few hours to get the site up, custom theme created, content posted and even a custom View created for the front page Announcements & other blog postings. I did that by first creating some Taxonomies for Stories and Pages and then creating a View that displayed only Stories that were marked as Announcements (with a limit of only 3 of them). Then I added that Block to the content-top area on the front page. For the custom theme, I altered several of the templates (page.tpl.php, node.tpl.php, etc) and even used the hook_theme() functionality to theme the Contact form template, with the help of this tutorial.

WordPress Test

Since I already had the templates for this blog, it didn’t take very long at all to clone the setup with another database as all I had to do was change some directory paths. I altered the page.php to match the rest of the theme and to provide for a special case for the ‘home’ page. It displays that page’s content directly, instead of inserting it into the post layout used for the other pages, but still uses the same header, footer and sidebar. I then used the Exec-PHP plugin to pull out the 3 most recent Announcements and non-Announcements, just like on the current index page. I used the Contact Form 7 plugin for the contact page, but didn’t really bother styling it.

Mojolicious Test

This is a Perl framework and not a CMS, and it lives up to it’s billing that it’s lightweight, easy to use and has no onerous requirements, unlike Catalyst. I converted the index, blog & contact pages into Template Toolkit files (I could have used HTML::Mason or EmbPerl but I have more experience with TT). I was able to set up this simple example in about 30 minutes with a little extra server wrangling for TT on this server as opposed to my dev one. Since Mojolicious is not a CMS, it’s not that useful for managing a blog without writing said software myself, but it’s a very strong candidate for Perl work in the future. I also like Mojo because it reminds me of Mojo Jojo, and honestly, how can you go wrong with an evil mad scientist monkey?

Next steps

Next time, the results of playing around with Django, TurboGears and Catalyst. Hey, look! Catalyst finally finished installing all of its requirements!

Square visible beneath, yuck!

Square with a difference

Visited version

Finished icon

.entry_content A {
    background-image: url('images/url-external-trans.png');
    background-repeat: no-repeat;
    background-position: right top;
    padding-right: 13px;
}

.entry_content A:visited {
    background-image: url('images/url-external-trans-visited.png');
}

.entry_content A[href^="http://webgurus.com"],
.entry_content A[href^="http://new.webgurus.com"],
.entry_content A[href^="http://www.webgurus.com"],
.entry_content A[href^="/"],
.entry_content A[href^=".."],
.entry_content A[href^="javascript"]
{
    padding-right: 0px;
    background-image: none;
}

C’est fin! Any modern browser will display this link with an icon and this one without. At worst, any modern browser will a partial or broken implementation of CSS will either display the icon for all links or for none at all. I can live with either. But IE 7 is not quite a modern browser. If there was a link with a <br/> or one that wrapped over two lines, the icon was displayed in the wrong location, at the top right of the first line and not at the end of the link as other Mozilla and WebKit browsers do. I used a bit of jQuery to compare the link’s height with the line-height in CSS and removed the background image and appended a normal <img> if the link was broken up over more than one line.

The question is, what to use and how much? Many of the CMS’s out there would be overkill, and some of the frameworks would require too much work for just some simple pages and would be better suited for a web application. Based on previous projects or experiments, I am thinking of testing the following:

• Drupal
• WordPress (the Pages feature)
• Django
• TurboGears
• Catalyst
• Mojo

I think this is a nice selection – two each from PHP, Python and Perl and some more straight CMS and some more a framework. I’ve evaluated Django, Drupal and Mojo before, currently use WordPress and have used Catalyst at my job. I admit that is a strike against Catalyst because of how that project ended up, but that was more a problem with integration with the existing codebase than anything else.

The criteria is simple – how hard is it to make two simple pages, the index and a contact form, with an include of the blog posts on the index page? Bonus points if the contact form can be handled by the same framework instead of a separate CGI.

Any suggestions for one that I’ve missed?

About a month ago I found myself with more free time than I had anticipated, so I did what most people would do in that sort of situation: I took two weeks off to remove some badly-installed vinyl siding and repair and repaint a side of my house. Once that was complete and I had managed not to fall off of the scaffolding and give myself a pre-existing condition, I decided to rework my website. The design itself was around six years old and the content had been more or less static for most of the time. I had, in effect, let this site get middle-aged and go to seed. Now it was time to get on a treadmill or buy a sports car or something.

A while back I had been playing around with Illustrator and Inkscape and had created a background and color scheme that I thought was at least somewhat interesting. I quickly threw that together with an unused logo redesign I had made and took down the old crufty content. Goodbye, quirky advertising clip art from the 20s, 30s and 40s! (Don’t be sad, it will return in a future site to be named later)

I admit my first redesign (thankfully never published) was a little heavy on the jQuery. Too many things moving, too long of an animated intro. What was next, a rendering of a metal block spinning and burning down to a company logo? I decided to Keep It Simple, Stupid. I set about working on a second redesign, but for what purpose this time around? Well, why not start off with a blog and use that as a means to link to whatever experiments or projects? That seems simple enough.

I had had a blog around 9 years ago (back when people were still trying to decide between “web log”, “weblog” and “blog”) and had in fact written my own blogging platform, but this time around I decided I was going to just use WordPress. Why would a supposedly ‘webguru’ web developer do that? Simple. I didn’t want to spend the next year literally reinventing the wheel. Why bother with worrying about whether or not something was invented here when the real purpose was to engage in shameless self-promotion and to post funny pictures of cats? Once I had made my decision, I did not debate it. Such is the way of the samurai designer. It also gave me a chance to brush up on my PHP skills after years of working with Perl.

I also did not debate using some pre-packaged theme. Using this excellent tutorial as a starter and with help from the Codex, I modified the standard Kubrick theme to what you see now. And that’s how I spent my end-of-summer vacation. The End.