Blog
Con Artist Hall of Infamy CMS
We recently finished up the Con Artist Hall of Infamy project. One of the more innovative aspects on the development end of the project is the content management system (CMS) integrated into the site. The CMS is entirely custom, but was built at a fraction of the cost required for most customized content management systems. The cost of the site with a CMS in this case was only slightly higher than the cost of a completely static site.
There are two major factors which contribute to our ability to produce a CMS at a lower cost. The first is a careful selection of features. There’s no point in paying to build features you don’t need, and sometimes the cost of building a feature exceeds the value it would actually provide. We stick to the essentials of what the client needs. The second factor is the technologies we use. We’ve developed a set of set technologies that allow us to very quickly build out the elements needed for a CMS, and our time savings translates into a reduced cost.
Feature Selection
The CMS for the Hall of Infamy doesn’t have every feature you could ever want in a content management system, but it does pack a lot of value in the features it does offer. The main concern on the Hall of Infamy was the ability to easily manage the con artists and all of the different views where their information appears, and to be able to modify textual content on the rest of the site without needing knowledge of HTML.
The primary motivation for building a customized CMS is usually having a tailor-made interface for working with the data objects that are unique to your site and your business. In this case, that’s con artists. When the management interface is put together well, it simplifies the maintenance of your data (and your site), and also enforces your formatting conventions so that you’re ensured a consistently professional look on your site long after the developers are gone. Generally this achieved by entering your data points separately (such as con artist name and date of con) and allowing the system to handle formatting internally.
Here’s a quick rundown of the features that ultimately went in to the Hall of Infamy CMS:
| Features | |
 |
WYSIWYG Editing |
|
Simplified Formatting |
|
In-Place Editing |
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Multiple Content Authors |
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Metadata Management |
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Wordpress Integration for Authentication |
|
Custom Con Artist Management |
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Custom Con Artist Category Management |
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Custom Rotating Quote Management |
The Hall of Infamy CMS isn’t a perfect fit for every site. It wouldn’t be an appropriate solution for a site that needs a more complicated publishing workflow where edits need approval before going live (of course, there’s nothing that would preclude such a feature from being added to the Hall of Infamy CMS in the future), but the solution is a great fit for the Hall of Infamy and what it needs.
Technologies
The first piece of technology in our bag of tricks is a set of custom Smarty tags. We frequently use Smarty templates on the PHP sites we build, and our custom tags turn marking those templates up for editable areas into a trivial task.
Our second piece of technology is a unique framework we created for rapidly building database-driven web applications. It allows us to quickly assemble interfaces for managing custom content and to spend our development time focused on the unique issues on the site instead of tediously writing SQL statements or data validation routines.
In the end, the bulk of the work done for the Hall of Infamy CMS was spent figuring out the details of managing the con artist data points, and structuring the content styles so that content editing could be as simple as possible. And that’s good, because, if you’re paying for someone’s time, you’d much rather have them working on your specific problem than solving a general technology issue.
Screencast
To see the Hall of Infamy CMS in action, check out our screencast.