…and introducing Lenny Linux.

1. Software is a poor organizing principle for digital production.
2. Digital literacy should reach beyond the limitations of software.
3. Discourse should not be trapped by production technologies.
4. Accommodate and forgive the end user, not the producer.
5. If a hi-fi element is necessary, keep it dynamic and unobtrusive.
6. Insist on open standards and formats, and software that supports them.

VIA

Roll your own boxee on DL.TV from boxee on Vimeo.

I am really happy about this as future use of ShantiCMS with Flash sites will be a breeze like this. A week ago or so I built a CSS file for a site template of one of Marketel‘s clients, and it reminded me of what a headache browser compatability. Having spent most of my time, these last years, working on either the deep end of the back end (as in Terminal administration of servers, or classing apps or, when having to create front ends, I would use Flash. There is one Flash player, versions yet, but one version will look the same on either platform, and on either Browser.

(also have to admit that I like AS3 more and more – for those who know me, I had been ranting quite a bit against it)

anyways, enough rant, what ever the front end. My trusted Shanti will stay in the backend. Google, live and ask like my  sitemap.xml generator as well. It really has boosted those sites that I use for indexed content. Especially since I tweaked the ‘priority’ variable. Anyways. I tweak it, what have you done for Shanti as of late?

A few things that need to building:

1. Betterment of the CMS media management
2. Add a custom contact us template or maybe a custom include much like the wordpress [contact]
   1. Add a subscribe Template allowing site owners to collect email addresses.

these I come up with of the top of my head. Also, part of my RubyRails self teaching classes. I am rewriting my shanti classes with RaR.

And the efforts are starting to bare fruit. Or so it seems anyways…
- I polished the function generating and submitting the sitemap.xml function (the webmaster-tools now fully approve it). The sitemap is submitted to Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com, MSN (Live.com) and Moreover.com.
- added a robots.txt specifying the content we want indexed.
- the addresses are now SEO friendly, resulting in better ranking in search engines.
- Also modified some of the PHP generating the navigational structure allowing the site administrator more liberty as to the appearance of the content, as well as more SEO friendly code.

The results, 15% more visitors coming via search engines, a 15% drop in bounce rate, 4.8 page depth per visit (as opposed to 2.3 before).

And to top it all off, Olivier, the master acupuncturist called me today, he got two new clients because of his site today. The new features have been in place for a little more then one week.

SEO time well spent…

read more at sephiroth.it

Two core elements have been keeping me busy on my Shanti CMS.
SEO and Remoting.

For SEO optimization I added implemented the Google Sitemap code found over on the CI Wiki. So now when adding content is modified via the CMS, the sitemap xml is automatically updated and Google is pinged to notify the surf monster that the content has been updated. Other engines robots also use the sitemap to quickly index a site.
I also revised the menu structure. Or the URLS rather. As opposed to targeting section/getSection/[id] I am now calling section/getSection/[title]. All this to make google happy. Ah well.

Finally I have been dabbling on integrating AMFPHP with Shanti. Sending the content to a Flash interface as well as a HTML one has something I wanted from the get-go. Several solutions are on offer on CI forums and Wiki. But after a lot of trial and error (more of the latter really), I am going for the Wiki entry on ‘Calling CI models from outside script ‘. So far integration has been a breeze. The AMFPHP service simply makes a call to the CI model wraps the data into a Flash friendly Array of Objects and shoots them back to the Flash requesting the data.

A little breakdown. The system remains, very simple. Essentially it breaks down into three classes. Sections, Pages and Media. The styling and visual layout is completely up to YOU!

Sections are the titles(building the upper level menu on below the logo). Attached to each section, you can add Pages, an unlimited amount as such. A page can be moved from section to section at will via the administrative interface (www.yourdomain.com/cms). The media section allows you to upload any kind of files to the system (filetypes can be added via the CMS)
Once a file is uploaded to the system (or a link has been added to it) these media’s can be linked to any page of the site. Each media type has an icon assigned to, again, modifiable via the CMS.

The CMS can be accessed by using the default user/pass administrator/administrator.

Note that before accessing the page YOU MUST add a published and default section and page, via the CMS. Otherwise your site will be returning you an unfriendly CodeIgniter Error.

Again, this system is really just something I am dabbling with on my own free time, but I am using it more and more frequently, extending and playing around with it. It needs a lot of work still, and for the download should be by developers only. I am more then willing to answer any questions that you might have for you to hit the ground running, and please please please let me know for any changes you might make to it.

The way I am developing it is, I deploy it to small websites and let the administrators play and give me feedback as to any kind of feature requests that they might have, and then I implement them.

a few changes I made as of late:
- move pages between sections
- set sort-key and -order of pages in sections
- billingual content

I am having fun with this one, based on my own experience and those that use it, Shanti grows. If you want to grow your own Shanti…let me know

Open Source CMS that is well worth checking out. So two fun discoveries from the other side of the planet, new zealand…

the Conchords and Silverstripe an open Source CMS !

I remember a year ago I wondered when someone would make a move.
Now, six seven months later a youtube channel, but blurry pictures at Apple offices during a mySQL conference…

Follow these guys, they make things happen…

humm hummm 3.0