No rest for the wicked. As soon as I finish one big project at work, I have to jump into another one, this time with a much shorter deadline. I have been asked to create a “virtual press room” for the upcoming International Astronomical Union General Assembly in Sydney. It has to be up and running by the start of July.
Now the sensible thing would probably be to take an existing (open source – we have no money or time for anything else) Content Management System (CMS) and modify it to suit. However, these are usually written for Linux and MySQL, not our (old) Solaris and Oracle setup. Getting libraries and applications installed on the system is hell and I don’t have root access either. So I’m going to roll my own CMS that does exactly what I need it to do.
The added benefit of creating my own CMS is that I can reuse the code for other projects. We long ago decided that the ATNF website was too complex for a CMS, but there are many elements where some sort of content management is appropriate and is, in fact, used. The components that I build for the virtual press room, such as image uploading and management, calendars and WYSIWYG editing can also be incorporated into the ATNF website. I’ve been itching to construct the components for a while, and this is my chance. I also expect to use them here on allrite.net.
Finally, I may be able to get this website running to my satisfaction.