After posting about my desire for a Simple Website System several readers have offered solutions; either helping to develop such a system itself for the challenge (and potential revenue), or pointing out solutions like Unify, CushyCMS, and Perch. CushyCMS and Unify are close to the simple solution I’m looking for, featuring in-context editing, simple tagging of editable areas through the use of CSS classes, and no need for a database. Even Adobe is getting into the game with their InContext Editing product (currently in preview) which appears to work with Dreamweaver CS4’s templating features. I may deploy them for upcoming Agenceum clients to see how they like them. This considerably streamlines the client side of editing, which means that I can close out two projects that have been lingering.

However, I’m still in a curious mood, and have decided that I really should see if it’s possible to roll-my-own website publishing solution from one of the many powerful PHP and Javascript code libraries that are out there. The problem is that I’m not really that familiar with them. To date, my PHP/CMS templating experience is fairly thin:

• Writing an image thumbnail plugin for WordPress 1.0 – 2.0.
• Installing and customizing WordPress with my own theme
• Converting the WordPress blog to use Expression Engine 1.5.x and 1.6.x.

That’s not a lot of experience, but it’s given me a working outline of how one theoretically develops applications in PHP. I am about to attempt to apply this knowledge to understanding CodeIgniter, which is another PHP framework on which Expression Engine 2.0 is built.  Since I’m planning on migrating my website to Expression Engine 2.0 in the future, why not kill two birds with one stone?

I’m going to take the approach I learned in my ModX documentation experience and start by making some assumptions about how a PHP Framework should operate. I’ll stuff it all in my CodeIgniter Integration Notes WikiLab page for now.

I was about to implement a simple ModX-based website when it occurred to me that it didn’t really make things easier for me.

While it does, theoretically, make it easier for clients to edit their content, it means that I have to now worry about deploying ModX on a foreign server. This is not difficult, but it’s involved enough that I would need to charge for it and be Mr. System Administrator, which is not my life goal. Additionally, once you touch someone else’s server you become implicitly responsible for it. I would prefer to be responsible for just my own server, but the implication then is that I then have to be offering hosting. I would actually prefer to avoid that as well. I’d like clients to pay for their own hosting and domain name services, so they always retain direct control over it.

So, I’m back to Square One. Here’s what I want:

• A zero-cost, easy way for clients to edit their website without breaking the HTML. No additional software should be needed.
• Avoiding being part of the content update/maintenance loop. THat makes me a bottleneck, and I have to charge for it.
• Maintaining the ability for clients to host anywhere, without me having to actually have to know how those servers work, or needing to keep a list of login credentials.

I think the solution to this is actually a custom web application that I deploy on my own server. Essentially, it would be a web templating system that gives each client their own login to edit each templated web page’s content areas. The system manages this content in a database. When the content is edited and saved, the system creates static web pages from the templates/database content. These files are then uploaded directly using FTP to the client’s server.

I looked around briefly to see if something like this already exists (it reminds me a bit of old versions of MovableType), but there are so many web frameworks that it’s hard to sort through them all. So for now, I’m going to start looking through the CodeIgniter documentation to see what it will take to do this. If something already exists, I would love to know about it. I’ve also had an offer by a reader to help with this, so we’ll see what we end up building. My lack of practical database experience has long been a shortcoming in my application development ambitions, so this would be a great project to help shore up the gaps in my knowledge.