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Where's Waldo?

24 June 06

So obviously this site has been dormant for a while, and I did that on purpose so that those still looking for Lenya articles can find them here without incident. I suspect with Lenya 1.4 comes out (wasn't that supposed to happen a while ago?) that the documentation will be useless, but we'll see.

So what have I been up to? If you're still holding on to my RSS feed, you're either really interested or don't clean up your RSS reader... I've still been working for Sherwin-Williams and it's been quite a challenge. Like I said in my posting when I was leaving Hiram, I wanted to learn new things that I couldn't find myself learning at Hiram, and I've done just that.

Content Management

Content management continues to be a big deal for me, as I've been working with Serena Collage. Definitely not what I would have expected, but it's an interesting player in the CMS market. We just came back from a meeting with Serena Collage reps in Portland, OR to talk about the product and it was an interesting experience to say the least. I won't comment on what was exchanged, but it was good to talk directly to the developers of the project.

But with all the experience I've garnered in both Hiram and Sherwin-Williams, and with the nudging of a friend of mine, I embarked on writing my own CMS. It's already being used on two websites. One is My Best Friend's Closet, a little website I developed for a local client that I still need to finish up odds and ends. The other I won't announce until Cameron mentions it on his site.

Overall, I'm happy with the product. It's easy to use for the end-user, and that was the goal. Is it fully-featured? No, not by a long shot, but I think it has some serious potential to be a player in the small/mid-size PHP/MySQL hosted market.

So what am I to do? Well, I don't know actually. I look at fabulous applications like Mint and how it was built and I get jealous. I've been doing a lot of research as of late on design patterns and OO in PHP and I'd like to rebuild the product in a smarter, more expandable manner. We'll see if I can pull it off. If I do, I guarantee you'll hear about it on a revamped website of some kind.