I wanted to give everyone a status update as to the status of Callisto CMS, since it has just recently changed, rather excitingly.
First, a quick digression. Have any of you ever experienced a synchronous event, where after a long period of time with no inactivity several complimentary events will occur in short succession? An example is like thinking about, for instance, Aardvarks for the first time in years only to hear coworkers talking about them in the halls and then seeing a documentary on them that very evening? Well, something similar to this has happened with Callisto.
After having to get a full-time job when my contracting work started to drive me crazy, I have had very little time to myself to work on Callisto. I've spent the past year developing an intranet customer and service management system for a cable internet provider in central British Columbia. It's built on AxKit and PostgreSQL, uses SOAP and some other fancy buzzwords and has some really sexy graphs and charts in it.
The synchronous event is, after a year of almost no activity on Callisto, several projects at work have gotten to the point where not only is an elegant and easy-to-use content management system a sudden critical necessity, but the capability to style the website for high bandwidth customers, low-bandwidth dialup customers and PDF printable output is a high priority. After showing Callisto off to management there, they are extremely excited about it (to say that heads spun would be an understatement). They have now made the decision to sponsor development of Callisto, namely by paying me during my work hours to develop Callisto as my top priority.
What this means to this group is that all those features I've been meaning to add will finally get put in place, and the code base can be finally dusted off and made into something usable by people other than myself.
Some other synchronous events to occur is my work on Mozilla application development. I have made the, as yet unfinalized, decision to use Mozilla as an editing framework for Callisto. This means that Mozilla or Firebird will be a requirement for using Callisto to edit a site, but not for viewing it's results. This will allow me to make the interface much more responsive, allow you to use Drag'n'Drop within your site, make editing much more straight-forward (e.g. allowing you to edit text in-line, with bold, font size, et al toolbar buttons), and so on. Mozilla and Firebird are both available on more platforms than Callisto currently works on, and I can shed the JavaScript incompatibility problems that have been plaguing me to this point (namely related to IE's propensity for changing it's object model between Windows and Mac, as well as between major-and-minor versions on a given platform).
If anyone has any serious objections to this, I would like to know before I make the final decision to go in that direction.
For everyone else, here is a quick synopsis of the features I have added or am in the process of adding:
- Image insertion (already in CVS)
- File-Browse dialog window for inserting images; this will allow you to browse on the remote site as well as the local filesystem for images
- Better server-side filesystem browser, with right-click pop-up context menus and thumbnail previews (for images, and possibly even for XML/HTML content)
- Better content-editing pipeline, allowing for the creation of different document types
- Click-and-drag management of content regions in a document, for moving paragraphs, sections, and sitemap trees around, linking text, etc.
- In-line text editing of paragraphs and other content (see http://mozile.mozdev.org/)
- Multiple document updates per refresh
If anyone has any ideas, suggestions, threats, or bribes, please let me know. I hope you all are as excited about this development as I am. If anyone's sufficiently excited, I need help in the following areas:
a) Bug testing. Since I'm the guy who built it, I can never find the bloody buggers (pun intended)
b) Installation / feedback. The only way I can make it install smoothly on a variety of platforms is to just do it, and see where it breaks. Either you can try to install it yourself and give me feedback on the process, or you can donate a few IBM x235s, SGI boxen or Solaris machines. ;-)
c) Usability feedback. Thinks like "This feels a little odd here," or "It would be more straight-forward if you did Y instead of X"
The framework I'm working on right now should make Callisto sufficiently modular to allow other developers to join in (as well as lowering the barrier to entry) but it's not quite there yet. If anyone wants to add features, please let me know and I'll stay in touch (or join the callistocms-users or -devel mailing list).
-- /* Michael A. Nachbaur <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> * http://nachbaur.com/pgpkey.asc */
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
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