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Super Simple CMS

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I can't believe it's been almost a month since I last contributed content to this site. Yes I have been a slacker when it comes to blogging, but I haven't been a slacker when it comes to work. Projects and customers have been keeping me busy, as well as a few side projects that seem to be getting more and more involved on a daily basis. But the amount of work I have isn't the topic for today. No, it's more centered around build a super simple, yet highly creative website using my favorite little framework Django. As I start to speak to more and more clients, I've found that more people are checking out my personal website in order to get a look at the type of work I have been doing. One problem! My personally branded name website hasn't been updated in about a year and the style and techniques are not things I usually do on projects. No I like jQuery and Django and I like to mash things up, my personal site does none of that. So I've embarked on a quick and simple project to give myself that "refresh" that I've so desperately needed.

When thinking about how I wanted my new "brand" to look, I decided that I would keep it simple, so simple that it would be ridiculously kool. That's right kids, Kool with a "K". I also wanted to do something sorta similar to Tumblr, because I like the ease of use and limited options it gives you. I agree that in blogging less is more as long as the content is really interesting. For my very simple and ultra cool blog, I wanted posts to fall into three categories.

1. Text Only: These are posts that basically have a title, intro (or teaser), body, publish date and then associated comments. No less no more.
2. Image: These have an image associated with it, preferably from flickr that will have a title, body content, publish date and then comments.
3. Links: Same deal as the Image post, accept when it's a link it won't have have an image or an intro associated with it.

As I started to think about this little system I saw some similarities and quickly figured out how I was going to design the data. In order to create one model and not have to make too many adjustments for different types of data, I started with the kind of data that I knew should be in every post.

• Published Date
• Type: text, image, link, etc...
• Tags

Pretty simple right? I think so. So I'm going to start with what I think will be the most used and simpliest to implement. Text publishing. It really doesn't get any easier than this. We will have a title, body, pub date (automatically filled in), and tags. That's it.

Once I've got the model up and running I'll post the code here. Keep in mind that what I'm trying to do is not use the out of the box Django admin. I want to create a user interface on top of the framework that allows me to contribute without the admin. I'd like to use the admin only for admin things, which isn't contribution. So to start the simple cms I'll need to build out user authentication and my posting model. Time is getting short, I better get going.

Current Projects

In Production