Problem Background
Okay, I’ll be totally honest. While there are things that I absolutely love about working with WordPress, I would really like to put PierCMS to task using a real live project. On my first round of learning to use Pier, I found that there were certain things I couldn’t live without, these included:
- The ability to use xml-rpc: I like to use an external editor to post blog posts and pages. In reality, this isn’t a super big deal, but it always seems a little unwieldy for me to edit a blog in the web browser. The admin interface in pier is kind of wonky, and it sometimes takes a little bit of fiddling to get daily activities done (inserting an image, for example..)
- Comment Management – I really liked getting an email whenever a new comment went online. comments are the fuel for blogs, and being notified when they come in is essential. The ability to handle blog spam was great too, but I found that spam bots can’t really find pier sites, and don’t really care about their existence.
Most of the above, I can live without, with the exception of getting an email when a comment comes in. I can’t imagine it would be too difficult to add this in to PierCMS
While this is a personal project, and I can do whatever I want, I would like to have a decision made in 24 hours. In either case, I would like to have the site live in 72 hours.
So, in a hinting around sort of way, I am saying that I would really like to use PierCMS for this project. Mostly because I love using the Pier CMS and Smalltalk.
Problem Definition
To deliver a podcast, a few things have to happen:
- An podcast object needs to be defined. There is a pretty strict set of criteria that the podcast needs to meet. It needs some descriptors, and a file attached to it. It could also have some text and shownotes attached to it.
- Those podcasts need to be listed in an rss feed. That rss feed should present a subset of the podcast object.
The site should also will also need basic CMS entities such as blog entries and pages.
I have seen that there are several plugins for wordpress, but have been told that the lot of them are to be avoided for a list of reasons.
The biggest plus for working with PierCMS is that it removes the user from most of the fiddle farting around with embedded markup and php. While it’s not difficult, it’s ugly, not fun, and being such, it makes me not want to edit and update the site.
A Little Help from my Friends
So, in the end, while I would like to use PierCMS, I am going to have to go with whichever system I can con into doing the above. What I am hoping is that some of my Smalltalk friends will say: “Hey! This can totally be done in PierCMS. No Problem!”
In the meantime, I am installing them both on my development machine and putting them through their paces.