I have decided to start building my own CMS. This is due the fact a friend wishes a custom website for which the common CMS systems, such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are limitations. Limitations with respect to theming is the problem here. As my friend also wishes to be able to change the content in an easy way, a static page isn’t really an option. Therefore, I have decided to design something new.

My incidence, the computer magazine I’m subscribed to, PC-Active, is also doing articles on building your own CMS. I guess I can have a look at their articles for inspiration. But also at my previous websites. Well… at the moment I am considering some design decisions.

Oké, here are some thoughts:

The idea is to have one “background” image, with on certain locations in the image room for a menu item. So, this would lead to a system where I select the background image, and select locations for a clickable area.
The menu engine: The number of menu locations will have to be made available to a place where the menu can be configured. And finally, the content itself.

Also, some standard stuff as user authentication, etc.  But again, the idea is to make this modular…. seeing how clumsy my attempts are to integrate OAuth authentication with WordPress, which is nothing more then a dirty hack. So… the design should be modular… yet… how?

So far, I have been thinking about the following modules “localauth” for authentication with username and password,  “page” for content, and “freeform” as freeformed theming render engine. Yet, how should they interact? They should be designed in such a way I can, for example, switch the engine without having to change anything else.