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.

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.

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 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!

I expected to have the website up by now but since this version does not work on Microsoft IIS I have been unable to get it set up! I hope to have v0.1 compatible with Windows. Please feel free to download the CMS, install, test and send any bug reports to furasta@macaoidh.name with the title “BUG REPORT” or report in the new forum at http://furasta.macaoidh.name/Forum. I do not expect to add any new features until v1.5 and I will post something soon on what those features will be, here’s a list of what’s currently available:

Features:

• Simple easy to use layout.
• Ability to create and edit pages with ease.
• Change site-wide configuration settings.

Download Format: .tar.lmza | .zip

1. I was sixteen on 19th September > Virgo (What a sign – a fucking  mermaid!). I am still in fifth year at school which i absolutely detest. In fact the only thing that is keeping me in there is the promise of College. From my perspective that is heaven! Parties all the time – and when there are no parties I will be studying for tests by Programming! What more could you want? I should probably mention that I have been in an all Irish school for my whole life and that I talk Irish at home. Native language gotta be done. Oh and just for the record my name, Conor Mac Aoidh is pronounced “Mac í” or “Mac e”.

2. I play the Drums in two bands > The Pot Smokin’ Pirates and The Dominican Affair. Guess which one I enjoy more? I started the drums when I was 13. Before that I played the bodhran (What a load of shite). I went to drum lessons for about a year then I tought myself. When I finished teaching myself I moved on to teaching other people. At the moment I am practicing for the local Panto. I have done it three times before, it is good crac on the night. Gotta hate the music though! The Pot Smokin’ Pirates where the first band I joined, or should I say formed! They were a school band but soon enough I discovered that school and rock music don’t go so well together! We used to practice in the lead singers garage. One day his older brother asked me to join his band ‘The Kamikaze Potato Men’. Thats when I really got to grips with the drums – I was playing with a band three years older than me! Eventually ‘The Kamikaze Potato Men’ got rid of the lead singer, found a new one and formed The Dominican Affair!

3. I am Oifigeach na hAirgeadais for Ógra Shinn Féin Muineacháin. I don’t want to delve to deeply into this because once you start me I can’t stop! Basically I support and am a member of Sinn Féin. I am in favor of a democratic-socialist, anti-neo-libiralist, egalitarian 32 county united Ireland. Make Partition History! 26 + 6 = 1.

4. Oh what else… I am half Scotish, half Irish and was born in England. I used to collect Warhammer! God I have to include that because it was not a minor thing in my life. For those of you who are familiar with the way it works, I had a 3,000 point Empire Army! That is pretty massive for a ten year old in fairness. The strange thing is that I used them for display. I only ever played a couple of times and found the games to complicated. My main concentration was actually painting the things. I used to paint them like a machine. I also had millions of nobles and all that I couldn’t use because I didn’t have enough points to incorporate them! Come to think of it my first army was High Elves. By the end of my Empire collection I had gotten pretty good at painting the models. Then I started with Bretonians. I had just enough of them to play – two core units and a general. I recently got rid of almost everything in my collection. I kept only a few things. My two best painted pieces – ‘The Green Night’ and a Celtos model which I made a cool base for. Also I have an old White Dwarf from the 80′s signed by the Eavy Metal Team. I might Ebay it! I think that I have enough to make a core unit and general army at the moment!

5. PHP. This tagged thing is directed towards the language users so I had better talk about it. I started learning HTML at the end of 2007 as part of a school transition year course. I didn’t pay much attention to it at first. Then by chance I got work expierence with the local web design company, webworks last summer. That is were i learned CSS and began on PHP. Not to soon after that I got hooked on the language and I love it! I am currently writing Furasta CMS, which will be in beta of it’s first “stable” version by the end of next week, hopefully! I am a linux user and have been since November! I started out with Mandriva One 2009 and then recently moved on to Fedora 10. I think that Linux bears a big role in the future of computers in general.

6. I can fight. With a sword I mean! I trained for Medieval Historical Re-enacting for too many years. I did all the shows where you dress up and people stare at you and ask you if they can look at your sword. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be really. It’s like any other physical sport. You do the same thing over and over and over untill you can do it in your sleep! Then finally once you have done it for a few years you dump the wooden swords and go on to metal! I have to say the proper equipment is pretty cool. It’s quite tough to fight with armour actually because it weighs a ton. I learned how to fight with a sword. shield, staff, pike, bow and arrow and claymore. I haven’t really done anything with it in the last year but there is talk of it starting again so you never know!

7. This is tough… Em… I am an atheist. I believe that believing in God is a completely personal thing and that it should have nothing what-so-ever to do with the state and especially the schools! I don’t have a problem with anyone else that believes in god I just hate the fact that so much trouble has been caused in this world because of religion. I was not baptised and brought up to make my own decision – and I have! It annoys me that my school gets massive “grants” from Catholic Associations and therefore it is a Catholic School. Not only that but the fact that I have to take time out of classes to go to mass four times a year. Basically I think that religion in schools should be eradicated, but the religion class should be kept. I think it is a good idea to discuss religions and to make people aware that there are much more religions out there than Catholicism and that they should make their own decision rather than blindly following the crowd.

Now onto the tagging. I am bound by the rules to tag seven other people. The problem is that I only know one PHP developer and that is the person who tagged me! So for now I will leave this part. But I will update it once I meet other enthusiasts, so I’m not breaking the rules!

Rules

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter

http://macaoidh.name/work/cms/

Username: admin

Password: password

At the moment it works. It is stable (as far as I know!) but it does not have many functions. I was half way threw writing some extra functions but I decided to put them in the next release. Also the graphics are crumy. The next release is going to be a beta of v0.0.1 and this is what I have planned for it:

1. It will be available open source so I have written an installer that will be included.
2. New functions: Add/Edit Users, More options in the Create New Page section, Edit sitewide Meta Tags and create individual Meta Tags for pages.
3. Get started on the graphics and create a user-friendly atmosphere.
4. Create an upgrade function – I thought that it would be better to get this over with early on in the CMS so that people can check for updates and upgrade them selves.
5. Complete re-haul (once again) of the code side of things. Make sure that everything is being done properly and make sure that I am not being repetitive!
6. Enable sub-pages which will appear as a drop-down on the main site. I’m not sure how I am going to do this because the style for dropdowns has to be added by the designer in the front end.

You will see that there is a good bit of JavaScript used for confirming entries in this release. My only worry about that is if someone disables JavaScript then they could break the CMS! I have re-stated most of the importand restrictions with PHP but I dont think that I will be able to do it for them all.

Anyway have a look and let me know of any bugs/feature requests or just what you think!

Try it out

*be sure to read the bugs list before you try!

url: http://macaoidh.name/work/cms/

username: guest

password: soeasytoguess

New functions - In my last post on the CMS I made a list of features that I would add before the next release. I am happy to say that all of those features have been added. It is not very feature-full at the moment and I don’t plan to add many features for v0.1.

Status - It is a very lightweight CMS designed for the use of the layman. It is far from ready for general release in this state but now that all the key functions are done I can concentrate on the visual and graphical aspect of it.

Bugs - Most of them are fixed but if you find any let me know.

1. There is one that I am working on a solution for. If you press the ‘Delete Current Page‘  button it sets the page for deletion. You then need to confirm and it gets deleted or deny and it gets un-set for deletion. The bug is if you press the ‘Delete Current Page’ button, the page is set for deletion and then if you press the back button in your browser it remains set. If you go to delete a page again it will delete all pages set for deletion. As say I am working on a fix and it will be included in the next release.
2. This one will be a bit more difficult to find a solution for. The method that I am using to edit and preview the text is done in JavaScript. I didn’t write this entirely myself because I can’t yet write JavaScript. The problem with it at the moment is it only edits a block of the page – so you can put some HTML in there! I have to do something about this but at the moment I don’t know what I am going to do….

The Future – v0.1

I am very optimistic about this project and I have big plans for the future. 0.1 will be the first stable version readyfor general release. I am still thinking about wether to open source it – at the moment it’s not worth it. If it is open sourced I will have an installer in the next release. This is what I want to complete for the 0.1:

1. Function to edit page order.
2. Function to edit page names and urls.
3. Fix all bugs! The edit text bug will be a hard one!
4. The entire visual and graphical side needs to be set up.
5. I will set up a sample website for the CMS to operate on to proove that it can co-operate with working sites.
6. It needs a new name. The current one isn’t great but i’m working on it.

Code-wise

1. Major re-structure of all functions. I have a funny feeling that i’m taking the long way around on a few things.
2. Create a define.php document to define all page variables in each page, such as url, name etc. This will prevent me from having to retreve the same information from the database again and again.
3. JavaScript, JavaScript and more JavaScript. I have been looking into some stuff – jQuery seems to be the most likely candidate. I have some great scripts in mind to smoothen the look and feel out a bit.
4. Possibly get rid of the current method of making pages as it has been pointed out to me that it could pose some security risks.

I know that I have laid out alot for the next version but i’m off school for the next few weeks so I will have some free time!Thats about it. I welcome any suggestions / feature requests / comments on the current release.

The easiest way for me to explain the functions is to show it to you. I have supplied a URL below and a username/password combination.
URL: http://macaoidh.name/work/cms
username: guest
password: guestpass

Take a look at the pages. Notice the difference between them when you are logged in and logged out. It is very simple at the moment, but I have created a model that I can expand on. Here is a list of current functions:

• When you are logged in you can see the editing panel at the bottom of the page, which displays the log out link.
• When you are logged in you can edit the text on the page. This is currently only a temporary fix because I haven’t set it to update the database yet!
• The page content is currently being called from the database.

By the time my CMS reaches version 1 I intend for it to be a fully functional Content Management System. These are the functions that I intend to implement in the future:

• Make the changes while logged in update to the database. I am finding this quite difficult. It’s easy to create a form and update but when you include all of the JavaScript that I have in order to make the changes editable and viewable in the same page, it becomes more difficult.
• Create more functions for the logged in person, such as add users and more complicated editing options.
• Add the possibility of creating new pages from the front end. This should be easy enough – I just haven’t had enough time to add it!

I’ll keep posting weekly updates on the status of the CMS. Hopefully I can get it up to a state where it is sellable in a couple of months. If it becomes successful i might open source it! At the moment there is no point because most people would be able to create something similar by just looking at it!

Suggestions and some criticism welcome!

Therefore I have decided to break out into the lucrative web design scene and I hope to devolpe both my portfollio and my coding skill at the same time. For my first couple of projects I intend to charge very little in order to get the word out there that I am available to do work.

I started my first new portfollio project the other day – TheStrats.com. This work graciously was diverted to me by WebWorks, where I did my work experience during the summer last year. I am basically giving this site away at a ridiculous price, but it is worth having the experience in my opinion.

For the Strats I am using WordPress. I was a bit sceptical about using it at first but then I looked at all the benifits.

The site is coming along well and I like the way that wordpress works, I will consider making more of my sites through wordpress. I also looked into Joomla today. I downloaded it and I am looking into it to see how good it really is. I have heard good things so I expect alot!

But at the end of the day I do want to eventully be a programer so i don’t want to get to carried away with using other peoples scripts, and figure out how to write them myself!!