For sometime now I’ve dreamed of creating useful software for my fellow designers and developers. Recently I’ve spent my time turning that dream into a reality. I’m not an expert or a billionaire, just an average guy wanting to share my experience with you in hopes you can take something valuable away from it. Enjoy.
Dissecting The CMS
The Problem
Somehow the three letters — C-M-S — when put together bring about completely opposite feelings in people. Some adore them and some abhor them. I’ve always been somewhere in between.
One of the main reasons I was never sold on any Content Management System was that last word: System. As a designer I don’t like having to hack up my beautiful design to try and get it to work with -fill_in_the_blank- CMS. It is the rigidness in the idea of a “system” that never seemed to work with me.
The Solution
Enter the CMT (Content Management Tool). Three years ago when all of my clients started needing “dynamic” websites that they could update themselves, I was forced to spend all my free time writing my CMT. It worked great, extremely hacky, hardly any features, but great. As my client list grew, so did the amount of hacks and feature additions for my CMT. Over the course of those two and a half years I had re-designed the interface twice. Eventually I realized, “Hey I really have something here.” And in January of 2008 I started re-designing and re-developing my CMT from scratch. All code thrown out the window, and built from the bottom up. Today it is know as: Firerift.
Firerift is in my answer to the CMS problem. I took the way I normally develop a site, from Photoshop all the way to deployment, and built something that compliments the process. Not something that constrains me to work within a certain “pre-designed” system. Let’s take a deeper look at the way I feel a CMS works best (especially for all of you designers and developers who share my thoughts on this CMS problem).
For this next part I am going to need you to forget about what the typical CMS does, because Firerift works differently. You see, Firerift is a Template Independent CMS. That means you design and/or develop how you want, and then plug Firerift into the portions of the site where you want it to manage that content. Firerift will scour your code looking for any Firerift Code Snippets and convert them into the corresponding function.
For example, the following is a simple blog page using Firerift:
<html>
<head>
<title>My Site</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Welcome to My Site</h1>
<p>I hope you enjoy my Blog</p>
{{blog}}
</body>
</html>
Firerift will find that “{{blog}}” reference and convert it into a full featured blog that is 100% managed from within the Firerift admin. Now this example is very simplified, there would be more parameters added to the “{{blog}}” (like which blog to pull down). But for simplicity sake, this is pretty much all it takes.
So you can see the flexibility that Firerift offers, you designate what gets to be managed in the admin. This lets you design and code however you want, there are no limits or template restrictions. Also, you have access to the XHTML structure of every function (blog, galleries, etc.) from within the admin. Allowing you to output the data in any fashion. Alternatively you can create “Pages“, allowing you to manage the whole site inside the admin, rather than just portions. It is this “anti-system” that enabled me to easily build truly custom websites for my clients.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Content Management without template restrictions.
Expendability
A big problem I think CMS’s are prone to is “feature bloat”. You look up in the menu and there are ten links, and each links has 454 sub links (a mild exaggeration). One way I think this can be solved is by creating a CMS “Core” that is powerful and offers only a handful of great features, but also give the core the ability to be extended. This eliminates feature bloat out of the box and gives users a powerful but simple interface. Then if you decide you need more functionality, you can install extensions or plug-ins. This gives you the ability to determine the complexity of your CMS.
Firerift enables any developer (really … any developer at all) to create plug-ins or extensions for Firerift. Developers can then package up and post these plug-ins or extensions on the Firerift website to share with the community. Thus making Firerift a CMN (Content Management Network - watch out I’ve got a lot of these acronyms). What does an extension do in Firerift? It literally extends the functionality of the software itself. Meaning, you can add features to Firerift.
I can’t say all this and act like I came up with the idea, because I didn’t. Many people before me have used this great idea, and I have to give a shout out to Shaun Inman. What he has done with Mint perfectly demonstrates this.
Design
Ease of use is huge if you are going to be spending a lot of time in a particular application. Also, let’s not forget about the fact that some small business owner is the one who will be updating his website everyday. Good, intuitive design is a must if you are going to be handing the reigns of a CMS over to your (technically UN-inclined) client. That was a top priority on the latest re-design of the Firerift admin. By keeping the design similar from page to page, using panels for information sets, and by using clean and clear design the end-user will feel comfortable and know where he/she is at all times.
Wrapping It Up
A Template Independent CMS is the best CMS in my opinion. Firerift was developed as a solution to my problem, making it a very useful piece of software for me. I understand that Firerift may not be for every project, because some people prefer the “system” architecture. But for those who develop like I do, I hope Firerift will be as big of an asset to you as it has been for me.
The Business Side of Things
Going solo and creating a new web app is always fun and exciting. You are the boss, so you decide how things work, what goes where, and when things need to get done. Exciting, challenging and fun. Then the preposterous idea of selling your creation to others who may find it useful pops in your mind. Your brain immediately takes you to a magical land where you have an infinite amount of money, a 400,000 sq. ft. home, and you never need to work again because your creation generates “passive” income. Suddenly you snap back into reality with even more determination to make your project the greatest app ever put into code.
Now to clarify, I am not all about money or anything. In fact I love where I am in life and I know for a fact money will never bring happiness. But that&rsqou;s not to say that at some point we don’t all have a passing thought like the one above!
After the “high” of developing your own web app wears off and you are stuck in front of your computer writing the (what seems like) 1 millionth line of code for the fourth time over, the question hits you, “How am I, -your_name_here-, going to distribute, support, market, and sell this app all by myself?” The task can seem daunting, and here is how I went about it.
The Product
I started creating Firerift, a template independent CMS, about 3 years ago with no initial intention of releasing it to the public. I only used it for my client’s websites. As things progressed I decided I wanted to release it to the public. “But how?” I thought. “The code is too hacky. What if someone looks under the hood? How can I provide support for users? How am I supposed to legally protect my app? What kind of lawyer knows anything about the web industry? How do I market this to my target market?” All these questions and more were on the front of my mind.
The Connections
One thing I knew for sure, I needed to get some help developing this app so it can be rock solid and expanded upon in the future. I am not the greatest developer, I was not even using a framework for Firerift when I started out. I was just using the “Drew Wilson Framework” (which basically involves a lot of embedded MYSQL). I knew this was not as solid as something Google would do for example, and I wanted it to be. Luckily I know a genius developer fluent in pretty much any language, not limited to just web languages. Basically if I could have anyone in the world write Firerift with me, it would be him. He already had a great job, and I didn’t have any money to pay him. But I knew it would be well worth it to have his expertise. So I went looking for some money.
The Money
“How much should I get?” I had no idea. But I knew that I did not want to get into serious debt over this. After all, I have an amazing wife and not so amazing mortgage to take care of. I knew that any advertising at all would be the dumbest waste of money. My target market is web developers. They are on the web 24/7 and you don’t need an ad on TechCrunch to get their traffic. There are plenty of other free alternatives. Design Gallery sites, ask others to blog about it, etc.
I knew I would be doing part-time freelance work on the side while doing Firerift at the same time. So I figured I needed the amount my developer would charge plus 2 months of full living expenses. Why only two months? Because before I would take the money I would get as much done in my spare time as possible, while still freelancing part-time. This really helped a ton. I built the Firerift public website, wrote some documentation, did all the final design for and basic XHTML/CSS, everything I knew I could do on my own and didn’t need extra money for. That way I could take out a smaller loan. Then I started the final development phase with my developer for the next 2 months. It worked out great. Oh there were bumps, and not everything went as planned, but that is just fine when creating your first app. It should be a learning experience. I now know a ton more than before, and have a very solid idea of how to approach my next app.
The bottom line when taking out a loan or borrowing money is: make sure you are comfortable. There is always going to be an element of risk (that’s what makes us entrepreneurs), but be smart about it. Ask advice from every successful business person you have a relationship with. And when selecting a developer/designer/whatever make sure it is someone you trust and is better than you at whatever you are hiring them for. Hire up, not down.
The Legal Issues
During those 2 months I had to get the business side of things built up. One of the items I went for first was licensing. Art Neill and his team of lawyers at New Media Rights were awesome at helping me get the licensing issues all worked out for Firerift. They specialize in the tech and media industry, so it was a perfect fit. I was lucky enough to meet them at the San Diego BarCamp. BarCamp is a great way to meet other web industry peeps.
One important tip is to ask. Ask other people in the industry you respect what they have done. It can be very helpful to get knowledge from people who have already experienced the trials of developing a business.
Support
I want Firerift to be easy to use for developers of all skill levels. One of the most frustrating things for me when I started out developing was the lack of documentation or the unfriendly way the documentation was written on various apps or software. If I had it my way, there would have been someone there to walk me through step by step.
Enter the “screencast”. An awesome way to help developers of all levels understand and better use your software. I will be creating literally as many ScreenCasts as I can for Firerift, to help make using and customizing Firerift as simple as possible. It can be very time consuming, but worth it I think in the end. The best ScreenCast software out there is ScreenFlow, hands down.
All Said & Done
So by creating Firerift I have solved my CMS woes, and hopefully yours as well. All this being said, soon I would like to declare Independence Day for all of my fellow designers and developers. Because soon Firerift will be available available at: www.firerift.com
Thanks for sharing, although I was all keen to give it a go but it’s not yet available. Perhaps this article was published a bit early? No worries I’ll sign up to the mailing list.
One question, what kind of content editor do you plan to use? My problem is most wysiwyg editors tend to allow the user to screw up fonts and colours. Even if you disable certain buttons copy/paste will keep any ugly styles. I suspect http://www.wymeditor.org/ is about as close as there is. Any other ideas? What about image layout?
Sounds interesting, but I’ll really need to get my hands on it to see what it’s like. Will there be a free individual version, or will it be paid for?
I’d really like to read more about it, but your website has dark grey text on a black background, so I can’t read it.
Good luck with Firerift … but given that PHP 4 was EOL’d just last week, perhaps this is the wrong moment to be launching a new product based on PHP 4? :)
This article was good. A little too much of an advertisement for the product but interesting to read your process anyway.
One thing I really took away from the article is that you developed the product from real world needs yourself over a three year period to get the specs right. So doing the final rewrite to ensure everything is solid was a straight-forward process. Although it took a little while it seems that was key to keeping the costs reasonable. If you had hired a developer from the start my guess is that you would have spent a lot more money evolving the idea through the developer. A good lesson for people who don’t have a clear picture of what they want to build at the start and have a tight budget.
@Stuart - since when did the tech matter…?
Loving the look of the *important* bits (interface, usability, extensibility)…
Mike
uh, have you bothered looking over drupal core? why rewrite what already exists? i’m a bit confused, and that commercial you’ve created does zero to assist users evaluating this potential solution - if it’s so close to release, how about some screenshots and a commercial walkthrough? that would help quite a bit. more specifically, explain in clear comparison charts exactly how it is better than competing, well established and community supported alternatives - that would be great. otherwise, quite eager to see what you’ve come up with!!
I’m sorry, but this just isn’t very compelling. The whole marketing approach seems out of touch and dated.
The website itself looks like its typography and layout was ripped from Adobe or Apple 5 to 10 years ago, and the header graphic from a Wired magazine rear-page advertisement. The commercial itself? …
I agree with Tim and dave. This article came out a bit early. And the Firerift site reeeally needs to give a compelling reason for using the product it advertises.
Very interesting Drew. It is cool to see an insight into this product! I have been looking forward to its release ever since you started to hint at its arrival. I hope these skeptics give it a try when it comes out.
After using tools like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, you quickly realize that that while each has amazing strengths they also have places where they fall down, especially in client work. If Firerift is as extensible and customizable as you say, it might fill a wider set of needs than any one of the products I just listed.
@Stephen Would you have preferred a water-drop with shades (Drupal) or multi-colored ballon art (Joomla) as the basis for the site :)
Well Drew you have certainly got my interest, I just hope the product lives up to the expectation you are building (in some of the readers of this blog).
I’m actually a small business operator, not a developer, and I currently have five sites which are all powered by custom built CMS. The trouble is that makes me reliant to some extent on the original developers, which can be a bit of a problem a few years down the track. It sounds like Firerift might help me avoid that trap in the future, so I look forward to seeing it.
Incidentally, a good way to avoid copying crappy wordprocessor markup code into a CMS when editing content, is a brilliant little app called PureText - it just strips all the formatting away from anything you paste from the clipboard. It’s free, just google it
Sounds like an interesting product, especially for those situations I regularly get when somebody in marketing wants to tweak the copy in an otherwise static page every five minutes.
The video was a bit odd - I didn’t really see the connection with the product. It was pretty striking though and I guess it hard to capture people’s attention without doing something a little different. I’ll look forward to seeing what Firerift can offer me
Looking forward to seeing this released and looking it over; until then I am just hoping this is not just a bunch of hype. Any idea what kind of $$ you are going to be looking at for this?
After reading this article, the blurb on your web site, and watching the commercial, I now know absolutely nothing.
Most commercials actually show a product: beer ads show glasses of beer. Nike ads show shoes and athletic wear. Where is your product?
I was expecting to see something that showed how easy it is to use the product, how different it is from CMS (as you claim). Instead I got a guy who has LEDs for eyes.
Enormous let down. Very disappointed. Probably won’t return.
I have to agree with those that said this article read like an advertisment. However learning your process was interesting, and gives me hopes for my own apps.
I do have to mention that if you look around you will find a number of developer centered CMS. One that I have been so impressed with that I am doing all my work in it is Radiant CMS.
I will be interested to take at Firerift, but would have liked to see it released under an open source license. Who knows, if you had followed the open source motto and released early and often you may have been spared the expense of a developer.
I’ve been waiting for a while for this to come out. It’s nice to see an article that actually tells about it! I’ve been in the dark for a while. I am not a developer, but a designer, so I was a little nervous to see that Drew’s target market was for developers. Hopefully this will work for me because I’ve yet to find a “CMS” that I’ve liked other than CushyCMS that that’s pretty darn basic.
I had a laugh at those of you who posted complaining while in the same breath saying there wasn’t enough information provided. How can you complain about nothing?
This sounds great, but it also sounds a lot like Expression Engine. Drew, could you perhaps outline the main differences between FR and EE? Thanks!
Hey Everyone!
Thanks so much for all the feedback. For those of you who don’t understand the commercial… it is just for fun and to promote Firerift in a unconventional way. Most people just have a screencast… and thats it. I wanted to take it a step further, and since one of my passions is film… I made that commercial.
Of course I will post a screencast outlining the app, no worries there. All of that will come shortly. So for those of you saying the article came out too early.. maybe it did, but I am stoked Vitamin asked me to write about it, and I wasn’t about to turn it down just because it was “too early”.
My point here was too offer helpful tips about writing your own app, and to give some of my opinions on CMS. Please don’t get caught up in a “release date”.. I am working hard every single day on this and hope that you all will enjoy it when it is launched. I am doing my best to make sure this thing is solid for anyone who will use it.
More updates to come on Firerift very soon, if you are interested follow my blog at: drewwilson.com
Thanks so much everyone!
Peace,
Drew
Bummer that it’s not ready yet, I was totally ready to go try it out. I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled though. It’ll certainly be worth looking into.
For now, I’m pretty happy using a combination of CMS from Scratch and Starpointe CMS (a custom branded Pro version of CushyCMS).
Thank you for the article and update Drew. I am looking forward to the release of Firerift, it seems to be exactly what I need!
I see it says it was built on php 4? Any plans to move to PHP 5 being that PHP 4 “officially” died a couple days ago.
@ Richard and everyone asking about PHP4,
When I set out to re-code Firerift from scratch I wanted to put it onto a PHP Framework. I narrowed my choice down to 2 Frameworks: Cake PHP and CodeIgniter. Both run on PHP4 (Cake supports both 4 and 5). I chose CodeIgniter for a variety of reasons.
As most of us who write with PHP know, PHP6 is much better than PHP5. In the future I will probably skip PHP5 and move to PHP6. But that is the future, and nothing is set in stone. For now Firerift is written in PHP4 for two reasons. 1) That is what the framework is written in, 2) PHP4 is running on a large majority of all PHP hosting companies’ servers. So it is widely available to more developers.
But don’t worry about what version of PHP it is written in. By nature Firerift is template independent. So if you want to write other stuff in PHP5, Ruby, Flash, ect. it will work with your content just fine. For example, you can write a nifty Flash Photo Gallery in ActionScript and use Firerift to supply the images and XML files. You will be managing the images with Firerift, but the images will be displayed on your website in Flash.
The version of PHP is not what matters, the feature set and what the app can do for you is what matters :)
Thanks so much Everyone!!
Peace,
Drew
First of all, going to PHP 5 is only a good idea if you’re thinking as a PHP programmer. Sticking with PHP 4 is a great idea if your thinking as a marketer. Firerift on PHP 4 will be able to creep into even the cheapest, woefully out-of-date hosting services out there.
Secondly, from the limited information and {{blog}} example provided, this looks exactly like EllisLab’s Expression Engine. I’ll reserve that comparison until it’s released, but I’d be interested to hear how this is different. Also the previous mention of Drupal is spot on. Drupal’s theming system means there is no part of HTML or other output that you cannot alter (at least the core.. some modules are pretty bad about sustaining this).
All-in-all, I’m not thoroughly impressed in any “new” direction you’re going. I think EE and Drupal already have you beat. However, I applaud your continued effort and enthusiasm, and I’m looking forward to its release so I can really play around with it.
Wow.. as an active member of the CI community, I’m ecstatic to hear the this is built upon CodeIgniter! the EE comparison seems even stronger! The “Fire” part had me wondering…. (maybe you did mention it in the article and I glossed over it)
Interesting. While I have never tried EE, I have heard good things about it. Drupal is beatable by the way but it won’t be easy. But if firerift is not opensource that could be a problem imo. Anyway I’d like to try it out very soon. Hope it really does get released this month… and thanks for trying this.
[…] I read an article today about FireRift - this seems exactly what I was looking for out of a content management system. Firerift is a Template Independent CMS. That means you design and/or develop how you want, and then plug Firerift into the portions of the site where you want it to manage that content. Firerift will scour your code looking for any Firerift Code Snippets and convert them into the corresponding function. […]
I’d just use ExpressionEngine. It kicks ass - you are re-inventing the wheel champ.
Agree with the comments that it doesn’t seem like what you’re proposing hasn’t already been addressed by existing solutions from the point of view of being able to output whatever front-end code you like and having a core to build upon with extensions etc.
Although many people keep saying its ‘re-inventing the wheel’ all these wheels you speak of are designed for buses and not the individual car. Sure I can set someone up with drupal, or wordpress, or ExpressEngine… there are a ton of them. But none of them seem to fit perfectly for client. There is always some explaining we have to do when it comes to clients on how to do this, or how to do that and this seems very promising.
Coming from someone that is constantly writing custom cms’ for clients you have my interest…. i do want to see some screen shots though!
Drew, your app looks very interesting and cool. Looking forward to seeing it in action. It’s good to get an insight into it’s background too.
Not too sure about your ad though - it looks really cool, obviously really professionally shot, but doesn’t tell much. Don’t think Alan Sugar would think too kindly of the ad :-)
Thomas Bailey suggests that “…I can set someone up with drupal, or wordpress, or ExpressEngine… there are a ton of them. But none of them seem to fit perfectly for client”.
As a professional developer with about 10 years of CMS construction work behind me, from Broadvision and Documentum to WebPower and Wordpress (and that’s way downhill..) I can tell you there’s pretty much nothing I haven’t been able to do for a client in ExpressionEngine. Sure - the curve is steeper than Wordpress and perhaps equal to Drupal, but it’s so flexible and light, and can be dropped into templates so easily, I’m surprised anyone with any ee experience would argue otherwise.
All this said, I’d really rather be writing about Firerift right now - seriously, append the silly promo animation with some CMT action shots and I’ll get excited.
I feel like I really must be missing something here. Template Independent ? But the very fragment of example html you post says “template” to me, loud and clear.
How is {{blog}} any different to (for example) the smarty templating syntax of:
Name: {$name}
(http://www.smarty.net/crashcourse.php)
It sure looks exactly like a typical token-replacing template system to me.
The only difference I can infer is that {{blog}} is a “bigger chunk” than {$name} which is a single value. OK. Great. So instead of doing templates like
[table]
[tr][td] {{product}} [/td][td] {{price}} [/td][/tr]
[/table]
we do just {{productpricetable}}
This is a good thing why exactly? Now the markup required to format our product price table has vanished from our HTML page, where the HTML guys can change it when they need to, into… where? Into the depths of firerift where only developers tread? This is what CMS and template systems are supposed to avoid, isnt it?
I can see three possible answers to all this:
one:
your {{blog}} example was hugely oversimplifed, in reality you would actually do something like
[h2] {{blogposttitle}} [/h2]
[span class=”date”] {{blogpostdate}} [/span]
and so on, in which case this is not template independent, just a typical templating system (which isn’t as sophisticated as, say, ZPT)
two:
You genuinely meant {{blog}} would insert a full featured blog at that point in the page, generated by firerift, in which case, should the designer wish to change those post titles from h2 to h3, he has to wade into the firerift admin and do it via that… how on earth would this be easier than letting him just change it in the nice familiar html file containing {{blog}} which he already has open in his dreamweaver or whatever?
three:
Something else entirely which genuinely is New and Different to all the other CMS’s out there, but which you have, I’m afraid, completely failed to explain or even really imply with this article.
I don’t mean to be rude but based on this article it doesn’t look like this is remotely worth looking into, it seems a retread of many, many CMS’s already out there, with the same advantages / pitfalls as similar products taking a similar tack.
I would go and investigate your site / video to answer these questions and get a better idea of why this is supposed to be New and Different, but (a) this article honestly doesn’t provide enough juice to make me want to (b) from the look of the comments so far, they fail to provide the answers anyway.
It’s funny to read some of the negative comments. I guess you’ll always have someone looking to criticize another persons work no matter how unfounded the criticism is.
I really appreciate the article. As someone who’s also created, and now sharing, a web app to solve one of my nagging web developer needs, it is great to read about your experiences. They tend to mirror a lot of what I’ve been through taking and building an idea and then making it available for the public to use.
Best of luck with the launch! I’ve used several different CMS solutions in different corporate environments but have never found a perfect solution. I’m looking forward to trying Firerift.
Content management is one of those things that many designers and developers have yet to find a solution that works well for them. I have been looking for a number of years and while I do use CMSs, I wouldn’t say that I have found one that I’m completely happy with.
I’m excited about this project… and it’s not just because it uses CodeIgniter either. I look forward to go-live when we can kick the tires.
I remember those days when I needed to use one of many available CMSes which did so many things but failed to edit content properly. Most of them enabled you to edit pages as a whole.However it is not pages what the web site and content is made of but rather individual content items (like pictures, texts, titles, articles, blog posts, products…).
I developed my own CMS handling management of different content items. Now it is also undergoing rewrite into MVC architecture.
This article is a good teaser (like a movie promotion). I am looking forward to see what will come out of Firerift - the actual movie :).
[…] Developing a better CMS […]
Firerift’s concept totally goes towards where I’m building my own CM in the past few months.
I’m not going to judge on the post, the site, or Firerift itself. I believe that no one that work’s around the web for over 3 years would be fool enough to launch just another CMS without adding true value into it, so I’ll be looking forward to see what comes out of this.
But regarding the philosophy here described, I myself am a designer, not a programmer, so I believe I tend to think about things a bit different than the ordinary developer. Aside from that, I totally understand the client side of this work and how one usually looks at one of our products. And it’s all about time and adjustability.
Unless the company has someone who’s hired for pretty much nothing else than updating their website, what really matters in the end is how much can the app respond accurately and predict exactly the processes that people tend to use.
To do so, you can have the most perfect form of code but unless it’s oriented towards problem solving and not towards programming conventions, there’s nothing you can do about it becoming just another system that’s around.
The best of luck to your endeavor!
People keep talking about Joomla, Drupal etc. And they all do constrain you by outputting old dirty HTML and pretty crap interaction design.
Has any one here tried CMS Made Simple (CMSMS). It already does a lot of what Firerift promises. It uses the Smarty templating system to separate function and HTML output.
It doesn’t take much for a designer to understand the Smarty syntax. all they need to know is HTML/CSS/javascript and they can do anything.
Its a true content management system since it applies NO constraint on the client side code it outputs. We get it to build the layouts, interactions and workflows that WE want - and it never gets in our way.
My team is currently building a CMS out of our client work. We plan to open source it. It is targeted towards developers and is focused on the simple creation of complex data models and apis. We find that most ‘CMS’ solutions are nothing more than blog engines that apply to a limited number of projects. Sure, you can extend them, but at the end of the day, your are just writing PHP and aren’t really utilizing the CMS to get things done quickly and cleanly. In fact, sometimes when extending the core the CMS gets in your way because you have to use its conventions. We are using the Zend Framework as a base due to it’s awesome power and incredibly clean, professional, and unit tested code base. Our product will be able to be used by non-developers, but it’s true power will be realized by developers who have a deep knowledge of PHP and RDBMS. We are super busy with client work, but it will come and it will be free.
Sounds really good. I am reminded of the old adage ‘underpromise and overdeliver’. I look forward to giving it a spin!
An article on currently available CMS would be grand. That way we can get a general idea of what is out there. OPEN SOURCE FTW!
I found Drew’s article encouraging as I too am in the process of creating a CMS (this S in mine is for Service). I think Firerift will find a market despite the competition (Joomla, Drupal, etc). Content management is a huge market and there’s so many ways to solve the content problem and everyone has their preference.
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his first app????
wtf?
I’m surprised no-one has mentioned MODx (soon to be MODx Revolution), as I think it does a lot of what Firerift promises to do. I tried all those other CMSs like Joomla etc, but none allowed me to simply create the layout of the site first (just the way I wanted) and then easily drop in tags like [*content*] to go where the user can edit their content.
It’s free, has a great user community, and seems to be going from strength to strength. The only other alternative even close (IMHO) to MODx is ExpressionEngine, which does cost money. The thing EE has going for it is that it has cleverly integrated the free CodeIgniter framework as the basis of EE, meaning all those CI fans (including me) will be looking much more closely at EE for their CMS needs.
I think it’s great that another CMS will hit the market, but it’s got a big uphill battle ahead of it.
It doesn’t run on my Operating System (the most popular OS in the world), so it can hardly be “the best.” Probably the best ScreenCast software for the Mac though. :-)
[…] UPDATE: I found a great article about the history and the reasons behind Firerift by the main buy behind it - Drew Wilson. It’s worth a read. […]
First of all, cool! Way to go, Drew! I’m totally looking forward to trying Firerift.
That said, I’ll echo Jacob: We’ve been using MODx for several years and it offers amazing flexibility for the developer. Other CMS products made us fit into their box. With MODx you can template how you want and manipulate and serve your content however you want. And we can usually get a basic client site set up on pretty much any web host in an hour or two, including dynamic navigation.
The biggest downside is no versioning or rollback — yet. Though we haven’t seen those features in too many competing CMS products either.
Anyway, we’ll be totally psyched to try Firerift, but we wanted to offer our shout out to MODx.
Sorry, but now we do have SEPTEMBER and coming soon or coming August 2008 is a bit out dated.
Were is the CMT? or was this article just a teaser or an aprils fool?
Ya… This cms isn’t coming. Just another case of someone promising something they can’t deliver.
I guess I’ll just move on to the next cms until I find something that truly fits my needs.
This is unfortunate, I’ve been very anxious to test this one out, on a good note, especially since I have a project on the go right now, in the need of a CMS, someone here mentioned another CMS, which I’ve heard of once or twice before but I’ve never looked into it, after looking at it, I think it will do the trick for some of my projects. I hope FireRift launches soon, I’ve been keeping my eyes on their site daily to see if their launch date had any changes but no such luck, anyways, good luck.
Best Regards,
Blaine
Blast. I was looking forward to this CMS. I understand they may be working on the CMS, but can’t they spare some time just to shoot an email to the list and/or change the release date?
Saying nothing is worse than saying something.
Great article, and just the inspiration I needed to start working on my own webapp again! Of course there are other content management systems out there, but sometimes it’s just nice to roll your own code. Good Luck!
Oh, and by the way, I thought the product video was cool.
Kim
I don’t get why you are building a complete CMS based on someone else’s pre-packaged MVC framework like CodeIgniter? Nothing against CI or others but it would seem to me that if you really wanted to build a solid CMS from scratch you would also build your own MVC framework, abstraction layers, domain models, etc to specifically work and perform efficiently with your CMS. Most PHP frameworks like CI, IMO, do not go far enough in their abstraction to develop solid, enterprise level PHP applications. You’ve already put so much time into this, why not do it proper from the ground up?
With PHP5’s OO capabilities, it’s not a challenge to follow the MVC design pattern with PHP, build your own data layers and create a much more robust system.
As for PHP4…I am with others, there is no need to use PHP4 for anything these days. Let PHP4 die off already…last thing anyone needs is another PHP4 app running around and being installed.
@ Steve-O
Great Question!
I chose CodeIgniter because it is a very ‘bare-bones’ MVC. There is not much to it, but it does provide a great skeleton. I am a fan of the way Rails was set up, so what I have done is build almost all the different methods Rails uses into CodeIgniter. It is literally like using Rails, but only in PHP :)
I am not at all using the ‘base’ CI anymore, and there is a ton of actual structure and logic that I have added to the framework that simply doesn’t exist when you download it.
I will be covering this topic in a screencast upon release. Which should be this week, I am happy to say :)
Also, CI uses PHP 4, that is why Firerift uses PHP 4. But remember that just because it is on 4, doesn’t mean it won’t work on PHP 5 or later, it will. PHP 5 didn’t really add very much to the language and that is why it never spread very well. Anything PHP 4 didn’t have that we needed, I added. It doesn’t matter what version I used, it will work with a broader range of applications now that it is built in 4, because a lot of web hosts still bundle PHP 4.
Check out my blog for more info: http://www.drewwilson.com/blog/
Thanks so much bro!
Drew Wilson
Mmm…I guess I will have to wait on the screencast then. Now you have me intrigued. :) Although I am seriously going to disagree with you that PHP 5 “didn’t add much at all.” That’s absolutely the most ridiculous thing I have heard.
PHP5 and PHP4 are virtually two different languages. 5’s major additions were a complete overhaul of their object-oriented capabilities which actually brought PHP into becoming a respectable language. The problem with using PHP 4 is that it’s impossible to do true abstraction. You are relegated to creating some faux-OO nightmare where every function/method is public. It’s OK for small apps and form processing but an absolute joke for anything else.
IMO, the benefits of utilizing PHP5 far outweighs any perceived benefit of supporting users with hosts that are too lazy to upgrade and maintain their systems. By the time your product reaches any kind of critical mass, most of your users (i.e. people who read sites like this) will have long since upgraded to PHP6 leaving you eventually to have to scramble to get your code up-to-date, search endlessly for those pass-by-reference/value issues, replace any deprecated functions used, etc. Plus without all of PHP5’s access modifiers, I really can’t see how you are building any kind of solid abstraction/real encapsulation into your product.
Also, if you plan on allowing developers to build on top of your product, it’ll be a huge pain to work with a PHP4 based system…especially for developers coming over from other languages like Java. “What, everything is public??” :)
Just saying, build the system proper with PHP5’s actual OO capabilities. Why mess around with the garbage that is PHP4? Just my two cents…
thank you
Lacks a few features at the moment, but I have been in communication with the developer and it all seems to be falling into place. I have been playing around with it and plan to use it for a few of my own projects, its very flexible. Same concept as Firerift - theme/template independent and lets you get up and running in minutes - perfect for smaller websites that need a solution *now*.
http://secretary.nivr.net
[…] 31. Developing a better CMS […]
[…] Just to throw another option into the mix, some of you may have already seen this mentioned on a few blogs, Firerift (coming soon). You can read an interview with the creator and his ambitions for the system here - Vitamin Features Developing a better CMS Looks promising! Greg Web Design Kent […]