After a valiant effort, a helper has determined that his proposed scheme for updating the site, converting the main site to WordPress, is not practical. Thanks to him for his effort and professional behavior.

Let’s try again. I’ll put down new stories for what I need below. If you’re interested, let me know.

Basic Idea

The basic idea is simple: My current process for putting up an article on XProgramming.com gets in the way. That process is:

  1. Write the article in a fairly cryptic XML format. This is tedious and error prone.
  2. Run an Ant script on my laptop that converts the article using XSLT, and, using Ruby, creates the various index pages. There are six or more indexes: front page, main XP Mag, Kate, Books, Documentation, Adventures, ...
  3. Run an FTP tool and move files to the web site in about three locations, home, xpmag folder, image folder.

This isn’t terribly hard, but I find that it is enough harder than, say, Wordpress that I don’t do as many articles as I’d like. So I would like the process made easier.

Vision

What would be just about perfect would be if the site was on WordPress. I don’t think WordPress can handle all the indexes I use, but I can get almost the same effect.

It is also likely that a content management system like Joomla could do the job.

However, both these ideas seem to me to require a large, expensive, and risky conversion.

From a user viewpoint, I’d like an interface similar to that of WordPress, where one basically types in an article in near WYSIWYG form (with optional viewing and hacking of the HTML), presses a button, and voila! the article is released.

Released, in my case, means that a precis appears on the main page, with a link to the whole article. This is not entirely unlike what happens with WordPress when you use the “more” tag.

Present Best Idea

My present best idea is to automate the FTP push a bit and put it into Ant, and just bite the bullet on the pain of the XML format. It might be possible to find an XML or HTML editor that would run on my laptop, and insert the standard boilerplate, while providing some kind of formatted preview.

Could Live With ...

I could live with a WordPress-style solution that freezes all the existing indexes and articles as they are, with new articles showing up on a new front page. Perhaps that, plus adding categories and tags, would almost work.

Ideas welcome …