[Gimp-web] CMS and face-lift

[Joris]

Folks,

Sven Neumann wrote:
> > If people need to contribute then someone, somewhere, must surely
> > take responsibility for checking the article for accuracy before it
> > becomes live and thats where a CMS solution would be ideal BUT...
> > in saying that; what I mean by overkill is that maybe the site
> > should just be pure, bog standard, HTML. A webmaster (or several)
> > would make simple HTML alterations to necessary pages and upload
> > the new version to the server.
>
> You can't have a large site such as www.gimp.org with just pure HTML.
> That would mean copying the page headers, footers and navigation bar
> to each and every page. That wouldn't be a problem, but think about
> what happens if you want to change something there. Try to imagine
> how much work it would have been for Jimmac to adjust the look and
> feel if he would have had to edit each and every page.
>
> Nothing wrong with keeping things simple, but pure HTML would be too
> simple.

I've no business here, except that I have a little experience in this matter 
and I thought I'd offer my two cents.

I maintain the AWare Systems website, http://www.awaresystems.be/. This 
site, mailing list archive included, is some ten thousand pages. It is pure, 
valid, and basic HTML, FTP uploaded to the host. There is no CSS. There is 
no 'resolution' at view-time, all is resolved at design time.

It's true this is not feasible using a simple HTML editor all by itself. 
There have been times when I needed to change some part of the design that 
was in all ten thousand pages, for example when the old design turned out 
not to work very good in the first popular versions of Firefox.

I use a little not-really-CMS, home-brewn code to maintain the lot. It's a 
CMS, in the sense that it manages my content, allows me to edit and extend 
content. It's not a CMS, in the sense that it doesn't run on my server, 
doesn't assemble pages as the users queries them. Instead, it assembles the 
pages on my own development machine, at 'design time', and uploads the 
results to the web server.

I find the whole discussion reminds me of the old interpreter vs compiler 
situation... And I've always felt, why should I use the interpreter scheme, 
why should there be one resolution per query, when compiling is an option, 
i.e. when one single resultion can suffice for all queries to come. I 
believe someone here pointed out the advantages of having completely 
ready-made fully resolved basic HTML on the server, when it comes to server 
load, slashdot traffic, etc, and I totally agree.

The same reason that made me chose for such a design-time content-assembling 
scheme, also is the reason I don't use CSS. I can make a change to the 
'template' in my not-really-CMS system, one time only, and have that apply 
to the ten thousand pages. That actual application, then, is done on my own 
machine, resulting in the upload of the changed ten thousand pages to my web 
server. I don't need CSS to give me that convinience. So why have another 
file for the user to download, and style to resolve locally, on the viewer's 
machine, time and time and time again?

I feel a small additional advantage of this scheme is transparency for the 
end-user. Anyone who views the source of any of my pages, really does view 
the source, and there's no need to do any complicated correlation with umpty 
other files and spend lots of time trying to make complete sense of it. It's 
clear, clean, and transparent.

This is just my two cents. It may be they're really only half a cent worth, 
I've merely this experience with my own website to back me up. I don't 
actually know all CMS systems out there. Please don't regard this a vote of 
any sorts as I'm a complete outsider here.


Best regards,

Joris Van Damme
info at awaresystems.be
http://www.awaresystems.be/
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