In the Beginning...
This whole thing started because I got fed up with WordPress and wanted something I actually had control over. At first it was a tidy little project... clever, self-contained, does what it needs to do. Then it started growing legs. I kept noticing things I wanted, thinking "I could build that," and then just... building it.
Turns out I was right to back myself. I've had to dust off some rusty PHP knowledge along the way. I have done this professionally for a long time, so it's not exactly uncharted territory, but building a full templating system from scratch is a different beast from the usual day-to-day stuff.
The thing I like most about where this has ended up is that web developers have total control. No magic happening behind the scenes, no black box you can't get into. Just clean, understandable code that does exactly what you tell it to.
I keep adding things as I find them useful. A lightbox plugin is on the list; one that can handle single images as well as galleries, so one plugin does double duty. Before I get there though, I need to sort out how images and CSS classes interact so I can control lightbox behaviour, gallery membership, image effects, and so on, all just through classes in the content.
Realistically, this was always mainly for me. But I wanted to build it properly, and I wanted to understand every part of it. WordPress is enormously top-heavy for what most people actually need from it, and every flat-file CMS I looked at (and I looked at ALL of them) had something that bugged me. Too little design control, or an overcomplicated templating system, or missing something I considered basic.
So here we are. As the xkcd comic below so accurately captures: there are approximately 1,283,234,847 CMS projects out there, all claiming to be the one that finally gets it right. There are now 1,283,234,848.
