April 16, 2008

Do you often go back to look at work you abandoned and find yourself amazed at just how good it was? That has just happened to me.

Before I got back into WordPress I was looking for a CMS to use as a platform for a web design business; i.e. the back end that would come with all the sights I produced. I tried Drupal, Joomla, and pretty much every other open source system out there and found them all to be very poor.

What I wanted was a CMS that was really, actually, easy and intuitive to use, and didn’t just slap those words on a massively overcomplicated pile of jargon. I didn’t consider WordPress to be CMSy enough. I had experience but discounted it.

Long story short, I decided to write my own CMS using superficially similar processes to WordPress but handmade and, as part of that, I decided to revolutionise WYSIWYG editors. Not small task for one man. You can see why I never finished it right?

My plan was to create a What You Mean Is What You Get editor, a semantic authoring tool that didn’t rely on any browsers in built design mode. I build my own replacement document object model that could be simply and easily expanded to use blocks of semantic code. To enforce the semantic nature of the editor I intended to save the content twice. Once as JSON that could be loaded back into the editor, and once as HTML that would be used as part of the output.

You can see the working example I came up with here

There is some (very) initial documentation here for the more code minded amongst you.

Seeing this again makes me consider whether I should start to develop it again, possibly even as a WordPress plugin; although, I image then I would remember why I dropped it in the first place.

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