Well there I said it. Can open-source projects sue?
I’ve decided to try a CMS called LightNEasy for the Chess Club (springschess.org) and it is now on-line.
It had been my intention to let Wordpress have the job, but I have become enamored of the idea that “dynamic sites” should be as static as possible. Wordpress, with it’s complete recreation of all web content on every page read, is incredibly slow. This is perhaps not a problem for commercial web servers, but it is for their clients (YOU, dear reader). For me it means even locally testing on my equipment is a tedious prospect. So while I appreciate that there is a very professional finish to the Wordpress system, and that there is a plugin to solve every problem, even this one, I need to move on. This is a difference of computing philosophy. (I recall a Sun guy saying “memory is cheap” back when memory was not cheap. I used to run Windows 3.1 with 1 mb of memory and a 10 meg hard drive. Those were the days.)
LightNEasy is a simple, no-database style, CMS system. It is about 500 kb of php and templates with a javascript based html editor (2.5 mb) attached for content creation duty. It seems to work ok with my mobile browsers, even for creation, so I’m overlooking it’s weaknesses for the moment.
Speaking of weaknesses, Wordpress 2.0 managed to get corrupted on my palmtop because it recorded my local net address as the root of my web blog. I can therefore not get to parts of the blog unless I’m online — i. e., I can’t use a PDA browser to automatically access the content. The forum explains that I have to scrub the database manually — weeee!
I was going to do that, when my system, running wp, suffered a catastrophic failure, and caused a system auto-rebuild, wiping my configuration and tools out. Now I will have to blog about how to rebuild a Zaurus. (Had to do it twice.)
LightNEasy regenerates the static content when you you change it — yaah! That makes the content movable, so generation in one place, hosting elsewhere is possible, even without PHP. It has a sqlite version, and a NO-DATABASE flat file version. It is flat for me. (I tried the sqlite; now I have a “locked” database, whatever that means. I know it means I can’t use it.)
Maybe I can even hack it. I fact I did have to hack something already to get it to work. More later.
But Wordpress still has this blog ’till I get something better.
Update: Spam comment is killing both Light’n'Easy and my Wordpress. Comments being turned off for the time being for Wordpress.