Wednesday, April 9, 2008

CMS or something more simple?

If you were trying to start an "a cappella arrangements depository community" what would you build it on top of? An off-the-shelf content management system, a made-from-scratch-look-at-my-SQL-skills site, or some sort of software development bug-tracking platform (if only there were an open source Sourceforge somewhere...)? I was thinking about thinking about arrangements as pictures and using a flickr sort of model.

Content Management Systems

The content management systems (CMS) i've looked at include:

PHP-Nuke
Mambo
Plone

The trouble is that they are very strongly geared toward text/articles sorts of material rather than file distribution/rating/discussion. I've thought about maybe making each arrangement its own article, with a description of who wrote it, who has performed it, something about the original song, links to videos of performances, audio, et cetera. It could work. The problem really is that I want a front page that is really uncluttered and really throws you straight into a list of what arrangements are available without you having to navigate through categories, clicking, etc.

Any thoughts?

1 comment:

Dan said...

Hey Ben,

I don't have any ideas since I'm not too familiar with web design, but it sounds like a cool project. Good luck!