First Look

Posted by John on January 4th, 2006

I’ve decided to follow 37signals’ advice and draw out “screens” for the admin system of the Ruby site before I do any major coding.

I spent the afternoon drawing a few screens out on paper. This evening I took one of the screens and fleshed it out in Fireworks. Pictured left is the final result. It’s a comp of the first page you will see after you login. It reveals the main contours of the way I picture the CMS working.

The first three tabs across the top are for the three main model objects: Pages, Templates, and Snippets.

Pages are the meat of the system. Each page will store the Textile formated data for a physical page on the Web site. Pages will be able to contain other pages using a simple template language. It will be easy to use the template language to create a blog index which lists the most recent articles.

Each page will also be able to specify a Template with which it should be rendered. This should make it easy to repeat a look across several pages.

Pages will also have the ability to include the content from Snippets—little bits of content that will be repeated accross several pages.

I also spent some time today thinking about a name for my new CMS. I’d like to use a term from the gemstone world. Scanning through the terms in a jewelry glossary I ran accross a couple of words that would make really good names.

The first one that I liked was “brilliant”. Brilliant cut is the superman shaped gemstone. Brillaint CMS has a nice ring to it, but it does sound a little vain.

The other option that I liked was “radiant”. Radiant cut is a squarish shape. I don’t like the shape as much a brilliant cut, but the name is rather nice. Unless someone has other suggestions I think I am going to call it Radiant CMS.