Mozilla Webdev

The last time Kubla came up we were still evaluating options and the code was an old version of CakePHP all flushed out with scaffolding. Most of the time between then and now has been spent on other projects (I’m looking at you AMO) but we’ve made enough progress to justify another update.

Out of the CMS’s evaluated, we thought two showed great promise for our set of requirements.

The first option that I got excited about was Wyona’s Yulup. This is actually an add-on for Firefox that can talk directly to SVN (via WebDAV). It is simple, supports WYSIWYG editing, has xhtml validation, supports WebDAV authentication, and much more, all out of the box. I like that it leverages existing systems in an effective way, and is fairly unique (compared to traditional CMS’s). It has a lot of promise for someone looking for a simple solution to editing static pages.

That said, we would have to make significant changes to the add-on, or, more likely, write quite a bit of code separately to handle requirements like indicating a relationship between a page in English and other languages (to tell which English pages had been translated and which hadn’t).

The second option is the well known Drupal. There are lists expounding on Drupal’s good qualities already, so I’ll skip that, but suffice it to say, we’re most interested in the modularity that comes with Drupal. We’re going to need to write some code to handle language detection and localization, and Drupal’s hooks should make this easier, not to mention the pile of pre-built modules.

After collaborating on our options, we’ve decided to pursue the Drupal option. I’ll be replacing the languishing code in SVN with a copy of Drupal shortly, and continuing development there.

Thanks for everyone’s input.

A little project named “Kubla” keeps coming up in mozilla.com meetings, and has sparked some discussions about policy, announcing projects, and general openness. I think what caused the debate to center around this particular project was my mentioning that Kubla had “met it’s first milestone on time.” I think people interpreted this as meaning that the project was pretty far along - in reality, the project is a few weeks old, and the first milestone was setting up a framework and making some decisions about where we are going.

So, since Kubla has achieved so much fame already, an introduction is in order: Kubla is a project to manage content on mozilla.com (a CMS). Since our rewrite of mozilla.com to support multiple languages we’ve been without an easy way for everyone to update the content. The goal for this project is to have all the content on mozilla.com easily accessible and editable by those who need to make updates. The project will focus on simplicity and usability so the barrier of entry is low enough that a casual volunteer can login and help with translations.

We’ve already had some preliminary meetings about what we want in a CMS. I think our requirements are pretty straight forward at this point (which falls nicely into my hope for simplicity). It also means that I didn’t want to build on an existing CMS, because I thought our specific needs were uncommon enough that they wouldn’t be served by a smaller CMS, and a large application would conflict with my goal for simplicity. Since quite a few people have asked me for details on this, I’ve added some additional thoughts to the bottom of the requirements page. Due to the upsurge in discussion, I’m getting some good suggestions for further products to look at before we commit to writing our own - updates will follow I’m sure.

At this point, there is no preview or usable site since most of the project still exists on paper, however, the wiki holds the core information and will be kept up to date as the project progresses. As always, the current code is available if you want to have a look.

Feel free to comment, ask questions, or volunteer. I’m also available via email or IRC.