Last week I met with P’unk Ave. to talk about their new project: An Open Source CMS called ‘Apostrophe’. The CMS focuses on editing content in context, and minimalism/simplicity in interface design. At this stage, the CMS is a Symphony Plugin and requires familiarity with the Framework to get up-and-running, which makes it difficult for me to really dig-in just yet.
I’m very excited about the project, nonetheless, and have been thinking alot about CMS lately. Particularity, that fine line between needing an entire platform (like Wordpress, Drupal, Silverstripe) and simply needing some dynamic/CMS driven functionality. In other words, the investment in templating on one of those packages is overkill for many of the projects I do which are smaller informational sites that require just one or two data driven elements.
One feature that I am in need of right now is a simple ‘message board/commenting feature’ - where users can leave comments without creating an account or logging-in, and these comments must be manually published by the administrator. The comments will need to go to a simple dashboard for approval before they are pushed live to their CSS defined content area.
This feature would be used for ‘Testimonials’ - a request I have found solutions to for more than one client. The client wants to display user generated comments/testimonials on their products and services. They want to collect these easily using a simple form on their website, and publish them just as easily.
The ideal feature-set for this would be a mash-up of a few projects that are already doing parts of this very well:
- A submission form that is as easy to set-up as Silverstripe’s forms
- A spam filter as effective and easy to set-up as Wordpress’s Askimet to block SPAM submissions to that form
- A dashboard, much like the Wordpress has developed, for approving/moderating/publishing submissions to that form
- A widget/view that is easily customized with CSS to display approved comments/testimonials/etc.
The notion of a separate ‘Dashboard’ to approve comments wouldn’t really jive with Apostrophe’s driving priciple of editing content in context. I think this feature could be easily accomidated however, by using a lightbox effect to present the ‘backend’ functionality, thus not loosing the ‘context’ of the content you are approving for publication. A simple email/RSS reminder each time a submission is recieved would be a nice way to make a user generated content feature such as this less cumbersome to maintain.