I have been doing a lot of development on Furasta recently and the project is nearing an alpha release – I hope to have it out next week at some stage.

Below I have attached a screenshot of the new admin interface.

A sneak preview of what is to come in Furasta.Org 1.0

The release won’t be feature packed, but the plugin architecture should be working. Note that the SVN has not been updated in ages, but I should get around to it next week as well.

I have decided to work on a new full version of Furasta CMS. I have already started on work for version 1.0 which will be a full re-write.

Also Michael Dever will be helping me out and developing some of the code himself. I am very excited about this new version, as it is a full re-write it will give me an opportunity to include some of the features that I have been thinking about for quite a while, such as:

1. Plugin Architecture. Hopefully I can make this work well. I have looked carefully at the architectures of Wordpress, Webme and Joomla and I hope to make one that can beat them all in performance and ease of use.

2. Users and Permissions. The CMS will include the ability to create different users, which have certain permissions to access certain pages. This is something which I touched on in v0.1.5 but intend to improve.

3. New Control Panel. The admin area will now comprise of a new, simplified, control panel. The aim here is to create a CP that looks empty, but which is full of content.

4. News Page + Comments Feature. I have wanted this for a while. Once I am confident enough with it I will move my Wordpress blog to Furasta to prove that it works.

5. Possibly a simple file manager. Although I am strongly considering using KFM.

6. Re-write of the Smarty syntax. Possibly get rid of smarty all together.

Because of the massive difference between v0.1.5 and v1.0 the website http://furasta.org will have to be reconstructed. But it’s all very exciting. Now less talk and I have to get down to the action, tomorrow, after a bit of WOW.

After a long pause in development I have begun writing the first stable version of Furasta – 0.2. I haven’t really done anything with the project since I set up the website a few months ago. But since then I have been building up experience by examining other open source projects, such as Webme, Wordpress and Joomla. I learnt a lot from those projects and they have contributed a lot of ideas for Furasta!

I have abandoned all of the old code and opted to write the whole thing again from scratch. Considering how long it took me to write v0.1.5, about a month of flat out coding every night, I expect v0.2 to be completed in the same sort of timescale. One thing is for sure – there will be no micro-optimisation this time! After all the effort I put into that last time the damn program was still slow. This time I will invest my executable time in more important tasks, ones that only directly affect what’s going on as you load the page, and perform tasks such as server side caching through AJAX so the user doesn’t notice it.

The project is also going to be available from svn from now on. Since I am writing it from scratch there are only a few files in the svn at the moment and there’s also no installation script. But that will come in time!

http://code.google.com/p/furasta-cms/source/checkout

I am taking a completely different approach to writing the CMS this time. In fact I would go as far as calling it an engine rather than a CMS. Basically what I plan to do is build a solid framework that on it’s own does nothing, but has the ability to do everything. There will be no pages except the essential homepage. Everything, I mean everything that will give this program the characteristics of a CMS will be achieved by the plugin architecture. So for example to edit and display pages, I will create a plugin. Obviously the CMS will have to be shipped with a few default plugins, which it will be possible to disable through a plugin manager plugin! I might be going a bit overboard with this idea but in theory it seems like a good one!

So enough talking, time to start writing!

I have just launched the Furasta CMS website at http://furasta.org

I started working on the design on Thursday and I like the way it looks, If anyone has any layout suggestions I would like to hear them though! Anyway I do realise that it is not 100% cross browser compatible. I looked at it in Internet Explorer 7 today and was shocked as to how all over the place it was. But theres nothing to major there, I might get a chance to fix it tonight. To be honest it took me 3 times what I spent on the design to come up with the content!

In the new website you will see everything you need to get you started. It includes an extensive help page that will teach even my granny how to set up the CMS! But if you still have problems you can email support as the forum is on it’s way. I plan to write something soon on how to take full advantage of TinyMCE because I was messing about with it the other say and is really amazing how much power it has! There is also a short but sweet F.A.Q.

<legal crap>One thing that I need to mention. I have to emphasise that the name of my Content Management System is, and always has been ‘Furasta CMS’, not ‘Furasta’ or any other variant of the word. </legal crap>

There are two incomplete aspects of the website, the Forum and the Template Repositary. I will work on the Forum – I don’t know when, I have evil genious plans for this thing and it might take a while to design. The release of the Template Repositary will co-inside with the release of v.0.1.5 and will support people uploading and advertising their own templates.

Well sin sin. I might write something else later about Writing Your Own Templates and make full use of the Codex that I spent so much time writing!