Web development blog

A few conversations, be they online or offline have lead me to think about whether I should be demonstrating my .NET skills through my own CMS. My priorities have shifted since I setup this site on WordPress, and now I think demonstration is more important than procrastinating.

My mate Kevin is already using version 2.0 of Bluemilkshake.ContentManagement on his site DigiKev, but it doesn’t give him everything a blogger needs. Yes he gets the basics: he can add new posts, add links, images, metadata and so on. But it doesn’t ping any servers when he updates his blog, and it doesn’t notify any posts to which he has linked.

Plus the system is not necessarily the most efficient. It was built on a module basis (a little like WordPress widgets, except those widgets don’t have to be stuck in a sidebar: they actually form the makeup of each post), so each block of text is one module, and an accompanying image is another.

It’s because of the issue above that I thought, rather than upgrade an existing system I should think about it from a new perspective, taking the things I love - and removing the things I hate - about WordPress. I should point out though that I’m not out to produce WordPress for ASP.NET, and I’m not creating a blogging platform. I want to create a content management system that implements a really solid blogging system.

So Byron is born. It’s an ASP.NET 2.0 application using a MySQL database. Why MySQL? Because Microsoft SQL Server is just too damned expensive. Why ASP.NET? It’s too long to go into, but it’s by far the more powerful language, at very little extra cost when looking at shared hosting. I’ll be writing it to support any form of database (or even a set of XML files), but this might not come till later in the development process.

I thought it’d be a great idea to blog the development process of this new project through from its conception to its first deployment and provide code snippets where they have value. If you’re not a programmer this will hopefully give you an idea of how a CMS is built, and if you’re a PHP developer this should show you that ASP.NET developers are real-world programmers.

I should point out that in an earlier post I extolled the virtues of systems like WordPress because of their “pick-up-and-go” style. That still stands. You can setup a new WordPress site in about five minutes from a standing start and that’s no mean feat, so I have nothing but respect for that system. It works too; really really well and the development community behind it is immense. I just think it’s important to put my skills on show on my own site.

Wish me luck!