Introducing Fotofolio
by oliInstead of reading programming.reddit, dreaming up topics and posting articles on my blog, I have instead opted to work on a CMS for my sweetheart Kristel, both to serve as her online portfolio and to be a fun small project for me to code.
Rationale
The reason why I decided to code a CMS from the ground up is obviously because there aren’t enough CMS’s in the world; who really cares about Joomla!, Drupal, Plone, Alfresco and Ion? Some even have the magic word “enterprise” thrown in there somewhere. CMS, ERP, CRM, MRP… for free?? Pffscht, let’s make another one of those 3 letter acronym software.
Kevin Barnes at Codecraft gives 3 reasons to reinvent the wheel. My personal favourite: reinventing the wheel causes reinventors to understand wheels. Additionally, having a custom made CRM out of love is unbeatable. For me, this application is an opportunity to learn a thing or two, have fun and do other things like working too hard at the office.
Fotofolio
Fotofolio is the name given to my CRM. The focus of this application is to provide designers with a simple solution to obtaining a online portfolio. As the name suggests, there is a heavy emphasis on displaying images and the application allows for much of that.
The interface and features are sparse, both to make it a straightforward and easy to use web application. A user has the ability to create and manage multiple worksets. Each workset can consist of multiple workpieces and each workpiece has an associated image. The published portion of the web application will allow the user to organize the layout according to these conceptual rules.
Technology
I decided to implement Fotofolio using Ruby On Rails. After flirting with the framework quite a bit, it was obvious that all that hype surrounding it is not unwarranted. Other candidates were Django, Turbogears and even Spring. In my opinion, for the scope of my application, only Django stood a chance. However, Rails still won out, whatever you may say, Pythonistas. Migrations rule!
Release
The first release is planned for soon, soon after Kristel’s portfolio is delivered. I do not plan to have features such as skin packs available right away. So far, the bare minimum of features is expected; i.e. putting some pictures in, displaying them on the other side. It is currently 65-70% complete.
It is expected to be an executable pile of source code rather than being an online service, and it will be open source. The license has yet to be determined.
Request
I admit that I’m a bit of a doosie with making up names. I need advice from you 3 people reading my blog about another name to give to this baby. Please let me know of any suggestions you may have.
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