We are taking over, we are the future.
Yes, CMS’ are the new black.
This is a response to a post that Tom Muller wrote a few days ago titled “Is the portfolio CMS the new black?” My answer is yes, I pretty much agree with most of the post. The bit that I agree with in particular is that the underlying platform seems to become more important than the work that is being presented. That becomes problematic. I don’t want my work be second to the technology I use to present it. I also don’t want the CMS I am currently building to become the primary and you’re work the secondary. That’s not my intent. Personally I’m loving the fact that everyone and their mother are releasing their own portfolio CMS’ to the public. It gives a lot of people choice and various levels of functionality and hopefully the ability to customize the look to fit that individual’s specific style.
Side note: I think designers are inherently curious about new technology. Especially when it can benefit us, or when it’s being created by well respected members of the design community.
My reasoning for building my own CMS came out of a desire to continue the development of Indxr. Simply put, I loved the administrative functionality of it. I liked that I could FTP a bunch of folders of images onto my host and Indxr would just present the work. That made updating wonderful. My problem was with the html/css/js for the themes/templates (whatever you want to call that). It was a nightmare to customize. You had to fiddle with the view style, than you had to fiddle with the theme styles. Basically the bits I wanted to fiddle with weren’t assembled in an intuitive manner (to me).
Basically what I’ve done is created a directory viewer, with just enough html to wrap various types of content appropriately and using css/js only where necessary for accessibility/usability reasons (SWFObject.js for example). The PHP functions that create the various content elements and the menu and all that have been removed from the index file so you can add your own extra html, javascript, and css (if you want to) and than add a few snippets of php. So you control the look and feel. I will make a few basic themes for those who don’t want to (or don’t know how to) do their own custom layouts. But, Possible Triangle is strictly a set of PHP functions to turn a directory into a viewable HTML page. Style not included.
Originally the goal was to just take Indxr and fix the problems I had with it. I looked at the functionality it had and what I wanted and realized it’d be quicker to do my own code. Having read Tom’s article I fully intend to make sure that the portfolio is more important than the CMS. I will not be branding it with any small link back logos or copyrights. All the code I write for it will be free. Probably GPL.
BTW, my portfolio is hosted at both Cargo and Behance, and I blog with WordPress.
3 Comments
Awesome. Thanks for the reaction (and dragging the conversation from my blog to yours)!
Good work!
I am using Cargo for my portfolio now, but I would like to host my own files so I’ll wait to see how your CMS will run before making a choice what to use when changing my portfolio.
It will be nice to make the code GPL, but include somewhere also a donation link by paypal, some people like to say “thanks” even when using free stuff