At the very beginning, I thought about things I would need or not.
Things, I don’t need:
- An editorial workflow.
- User management.
- A secure framework, because it runs locally.
Things, I need:
- A WYSIWYG editor with basic functionality only.
- A flexible smart core system, which is easily to extend.
- A templating engine, which is powerful and simple to handle, especially the export to static html, creation of menus and so on.
At the outset, I was thinking about the gui, I decided on a webinterface. The advantage is, that you don’t need an extra component to preview the generated html. Therefore, I decided on a locally running small web server. So I can use the WYSIWYG html editor FCKeditor, that is very nice to handle.
But when Poormans was ready to develop a user friendly web gui, I recognized I hated doing this. Therefore, I decided on using eclipse’s swt. By throwing away all the web gui stuff, poormans became a smart and compact swt application. By running a small webserver in the background, I can use the advantage of a web interface (previewing, WYSWYG html editor) without programming a complete web gui.
Poormans is not a system for absolute beginners, because if you want to create a new site, there are some velocity templates and macros, which have to be created or adapted.