E2: An Introduction

Jan 30, 10:24 PM • e2

I’ve been developing web sites for several years and in that time I’ve had the opportunity to work on a variety of platforms and set-ups. Every site I’ve done has been slightly different. Tailored to a specific need or goal.

In that time I’ve worked with a number of free and commerical CMS packages. It never failed but there was always one part of the package that didn’t work, didn’t work well or just plain failed. It was also common that a given package just plain lacked a need feature.

Like most developers I saw this a an opportunity to craft my own. If for no other reason that to gain experience and try new things. It started a little over a year ago, at that time I affectionately called it exSite!

ExSite! was almost completely XML based. I used a custom DTD and use PHP to parse each document into variables which could be output into a template. Despite the obvious short comings this worked really well. The system has a complete editor where users could upload, create, move, copy, rename and delete files. Files could be opened for editing. The system had a rough, but funtional plugin API.

The system was updated, support for FTP file management was added (previously the system relied on local write permissions) as was multibyte support.

Recently the system was rewritten (not a difficult task as I kept the code base pretty small, under 100k in fact, including images). The focus of the rewrite was to move past the limitations of the XML format and improve the classiness of the application.

E2 was born, although it wasn’t much of a system. E2 lacked the online administrative functions of it’s predecessor. However, e2 became a solid site framework. It supports caching, text filtering, has an application api and offers a wealth of benefits over the previous version.

I’m now reviewing the last of my experiments and preparing to build the final version of my site manager. This journal will be a recording of what I find out while I’m developing it.