Andy Chase

I've been carrying an idea for a lightweight, easy to learn and use CMS around in my head for at least a year now. Last week I went so far so to write down what I felt would be reasonable goals for a 0.1 release. I even thought of a great name for it. This morning I spent some more time thinking about the problem and boy, I really don't want to spend a month of nights and weekends to reinvent this wheel.

The problem is, I also don't want to spend a month of nights and weekends trying to learn some existing CMS that is either total overkill for a one-man site (Joomla, anyone?), or not suited for the type of site I want to build (TextPattern and the like are nice, but I want something a bit more than a weblog.)

I feel as though I'm about to do something stupid like throw together a hand-coded site just to get something started, then add functionality as needed. The old spit and baling wire approach! It's how I started my first weblog in 2001, and why I ultimately abandoned all such tinkering in favor of the basic functionality the Blogger provides.

I would try to be savvy this time around, though; If I spend my time working on hacks to glue existing services together (Blogger, Flickr, etc.) it may be time well-spent.