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Possible Triangle isn’t really a new kind of CMS. You may be wondering why I want to add yet another CMS to the seemingly infinite choices we currently have. Well, let me explain. Here goes.

Firstly, Possible Triangle isn’t a blogging CMS. It’s a portfolio CMS. I guess it will compete against Cargo Collective, Krop Creative Database, Indexhibit, Core CMS, and Indxr (well, Indxr isn’t actively being developed, more on that), but not really. All of which are stellar services. I’m sure there are a whole bunch of others out there that I didn’t list. But you get the idea. I currently use Cargo and probably will continue to do so. To my artist friends I usually recommend Indexhibit. For why would you do that? Well, I don’t have the time of day to develop my own portfolio, plus designing it would drive me nuts (like they say, you’re your own worst client, it’s true). The guys at Cargo are great designers and I like the look of the service. Indexhibit for friends is great as it’s super easy to set up and customise. Which is handy, but out of the box it looks good as well. Besides Daniel Eatock and Jeffery Vaska and the rest of the Indexhibit community are truly inspiring.

In 2006 Andreas Pihlstrom created Indxr and released it to a private group and later opened it up to the public. I was fortunate enough to get in on the private release. I really enjoyed the project, and tried to help out on the forums when and where I could. I guess Andreas got busy or something and on his website has said the project died in 2008. The thing I liked about Indxr was you could simply FTP content to your server and the app would pick it up and display it. No need to create posts, or do any administration. You could create a simple folder structure on your computer and upload it. And it would get reflected on the website. You could rearrange the files directly on the server and Indxr would show the changes. Without doing anything. What genius. I want Possible Triangle to reflect that. I want that level of simplicity for the user. I did have a few issues with Indxr. It’s not all unconditional love. I don’t think the code was ever finished. There’s calls to files that don’t exist. Cross browser compatibility is mediocre, at the best. The more content you put up the slower the app gets (there is a caching system, but you have to enable it yourself, something not everyone knows how to do). Creating a custom design is… difficult. Originally I was just going to take the Indxr app and strip it down to nothing and rebuild it. Which I still plan on doing, provided Andreas is cool with that.

The new plan? CodeIgniter. CI is a PHP framework that is really light weight and to what I’ve seen quite powerful. I still want to keep the idea of how Indxr functions. I need to start from scratch. I don’t like looking at the code of others. Especially when we have different coding practices. Anyway, there’s no release date. This will be an ongoing project and I’ll be doing some private testing shortly. It will of course be released under the GPL and free. Which also means I probably won’t be providing much support. I will try my best. And I’ll even try documenting. Regarding the name. Ask Mark. He came up with it. I met Mark on the Indxr forums. We’re Twitter pals now. I’ll also be in his neck of the woods in November. He’s also the genius who made the little looping animation on Unttld. So hopefully we’ll become real life non digital pals. Updates soon. Oh, welcome to The Invisible Institute, I’ll introduce you to her shortly, but you can’t tell anyone. It’s a secret.

—13 September 2009, Possible Triangle
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