I'm going through one of those stages again where I'm thinking about cms's (content management systems) again, and what I want to do with my site.

I've got a fascination with programming them, the one that runs my site is probably the 5th one I've written, and I'm happy with it.

But I want more, and I don't want to do all the base stuff again... I keep on thinking in the back of my mind that something built on top of Zope might be nice... but there's something about it that rubs me wrong.

Movable Type looks good too, but it's mostly a blog thing, and I've got other stuff I want to do than just blog... I guess I really want something written in java, with some sort of scripting model inside the content...

I've written my own parsers, it's kinda a pain... the site you're looking at right now has it's content stored in a mysql database, and then when a page is hit (the first time) I pull it out, write out some java code with it and compile it (sorta like what jsp's do) on the fly, and then bring it up through a custom class loader. A nice experiment... and it worked out pretty nicely... except I'm paranoid about my site getting hacked and someone putting in java code and doing Bad Things ™ to the box... so I've had the code that would allow alot of the cool dynamic stuff disabled.

So where was I going with this? Oh yea- what would be cool is to have the backend like it is... but instead of having the content compiled into java classes, have the content go through a python interpreter or something... or javascript. There's already Jython for the java to python stuff, and then there's Rhino, a javascript implementation in java... but then I still have to code the backend. Which isn't such a bad thing I guess.

I've been looking at Andy's gestalt stuff, and I know I want to do something like that too... except I can't wrap my head completely around it. I think I've got it, but the port would be hard... might as well just take the ideas and start from scratch in java.

And I'm sick of maintaining my code, and editing stuff through the web. Which is why I wrote BlogShop... speaking of which, I should put a new build out there for people to play with, and update the source on the web. (I'm using it right now to write this post). It's sooooooooo much nicer than editing through the web... anyway, back to coding.

Oh, and progress on VoodooPad is coming along nicely too- here's what the current icon looks like: