One of the major problems with content management systems is that they tend to force you into working according their rules. If you want to change the design of the site, they give you access to their templates. You have to shoehorn your design into those templates if you want it to work. And then you have to debug why it doesn’t work as you really wanted it to.
This means that firstly there is usually a hefty learning curve, and secondly that you always have to end up with a compromise between what you originally planned and what you are forced to fit in with to make it work.
While we produce bespoke web-sites for clients of all sizes, we also have a desire to make life easier for people. The world is complicated enough already. Why add to it?
When we wanted to install a content management system for a new client, we spent literally days installing and testing CMS systems of all shapes and sizes. But we kept on hitting the same problem on each one. Namely, the only way to change the design or the template of any of them was to dig into the package and modify THEIR template files.
We just found this too restrictive, so the idea of building our own content management system was born.
After coming up with the basic specs (the guiding principle was that it had to be SIMPLE, and it had to allow designers and creatives free range and not restrict their creativity even slightly), we sat down and wrote it. We are quite proud of what we have achieved.
Why? What makes it really different from the rest of the commercial systems out there? Well, it’s simple to install, understand and use. You can install it on any EXISTING HTML or PHP scripted site. (You just have to change the file extension to .PHP (that’s for a Windows server – just modify the .htaccess file on a Linux server) and add two lines of code to each page.It was made specifically with the designer in mind, so you can create the design, create a new page from your design or template and then upload it. Then you or the customer can add the content directly onto the page at any time. We can now tweak the template and upload the revised pages at the exact same time as the customer is updating the content, and without penalty or risk. This is pretty cool.
Another big plus is that content changes cannot be overwritten because of different versions locally and on the server. It’s all in one file for each page, in one location.
And for you techies, the White Dragon uses XML and flat files to store and deliver the page content, so it works equally well on a Windows or Linux operating system and you DO NOT need a database or to know anything at all about PHP. And because all the program code sits in one directory, separate from the content or the pages, the installation and future upgrades are seamless. Just upload the latest version into the code directory and start using any newly released features in your web pages, old or new.
When we created it, we realised that there are a lot of web design companies out there who have the exact same problem, but don’t have the in-house expertise to build what they really wanted.
So we decided to make it available to the rest of the web design companies out there (for a modest fee). We are already committed to keeping it up to date and current with the latest changes and additional features, because we now use it on all the web sites that we build.
Content management is a big thing for the future, because content is king and it should be the user that totally controls the content.