Silver Lining
March 9th, 2006
In honor of my first ever trip to South by Southwest, I’ve redesigned the Art of Mission site. I call this design “Silver Lining”.
Shows what you can do with Typo and Ruby on Rails. The more I use Typo the more I think that it may become a contender for the most flexible content management system available for small sites.
Everything old is new again:
Our portfolio. Check out some of the sites we’ve worked on over the past year in our portfolio.
Our footer. Now even more useful. Why should the good stuff end when you get to the bottom of the page? Our fancy new footer now features the latest three articles, a handy real-time search box, and our contact information, conveniently placed so that you can send us an email or a postcard to say hi!
March 9th, 2006 at 05:00 PM Hey Ryan, new design looks great. Haven't had a chance to play with Typo yet at all. While I think Textpattern is the most flexible CMS available for small sites, I'm interested in knowing what the features of Typo are, from what I've seen it looks like your standard blogging engine. Maybe you could elaborate?
March 9th, 2006 at 05:10 PM Thanks Nick! The more I use Typo the more I come to like it. It's really more suitable for developers, but if you can write Ruby code you can pretty much do anything with it. I've used Textpattern also, and it's wonderful. We use it over at "Godbit":http://godbit.com/, and it works very well. I don't use it for clients because I find it very hard to train users on the distinction between categories, sections, pages, forms, and the other unconventional terminology. Other than that, no complaints about Textpattern. Some of the features that I like about Typo: Creating custom themes is soooo easy. You can re-write any portion of the program just by including a variation of the file (they're called "views" and "partials" in Rails) in your theme. I also like the built-in support for AJAX comments and the real-time search box. Typo is not without shortcomings. It is a little weak in its support for static pages (as opposed to blog posts). I would also like to see support for hierarchical pages, alternate sidebars, and different types of content. However, because it's built on Ruby on Rails, it's fairly easy to hack it to do what you want. I'm currently in the middle of writing an article (always takes a little longer than I think it should) comparing various content management systems - look for that soon.
March 9th, 2006 at 10:26 PM Nice. I'll be looking forward to reading that article. Seems like we're always on the quest to find the perfect CMS. Speaking of which, I'm really surprised with all the flood of apps spilling out on the web recently there hasn't been a Rails CMS that hasn't taken off.