ColdBricks 1.0
So it's official, my new venture is now live and open to the public. ColdBricks is a free and open source content management system specially tailored for highly modular websites like portals and dashboards. The current version runs on ColdFusion 7, 8 and Railo 2 (still having problems with BlueDragon though).
In contrast with most content management systems, ColdBricks is more like a site generator and an administration tool rolled into one. What this means is that the sites that you create using ColdBricks do not rely on ColdBricks itself in order to run. However, with ColdBricks you can still manage any aspect of the new site. You can control things like pages, content, layout, placement of elements within pages, accounts, etc.
This separation is possible because sites created with ColdBricks run on top of the HomePortals framework. HomePortals acts like a "runtime engine" for these portals. So, by tapping into the HomePortals API, ColdBricks can manipulate any aspect of the site, and at the same time, the site itself relies exclusively on HomePortals to function.
Site Templates Another interesting feature in ColdBricks are the "Site Templates". I mentioned before that you can use ColdBricks to generate a site or portal. SiteTemplates give you the option to have a sort of skeleton to generate different "kinds" of sites. For example, ColdBricks comes out of the box with 2 templates: Blog and StartPage. The first can be used to create a very (very) simple blog; and the second templates creates a "personal start page", pretty much like the one I have here. These templates are meant as starting points and once the site is created you can start modifying and customizing to your heart's content. Now, the nice thing about templates in ColdBricks is that you can add your templates to the application. For example, you can create templates for sites that you have to create frequently and just add it to the proper directory in the application.
In the future I plan to provide a place in the ColdBricks website where people can download (or even post) site templates and other resource to share.
Feel free to check ColdBricks out and take it for a spin. Feedback is always welcome and bug reports even more.
Hope you like it!
A good documentation is very needed to understand, develop and extent a CMS framework.
In every opensource CMS I found in Coldfusion lacks it and due to that many developers not using it and go for commerical one or opensource PHP based Cms like drupal, Joomla which have excellent docs written and even books. Whhen I gone through your site, there alsoI didn't find documentation or is that inside the zip folder of the CMS? So just want to acknowledge you about docs in the begining stage itself,
Congrats for your hardwork.
You are absolutely right Shimju, good documentation is essential to the success of a project. Sadly this is an area in which ColdBricks is sorely lacking. However I am right now on the process of setting up a wiki to start posting documentation about ColdBricks and the HomePortals framework. As far as documentation Included in the zip package, there is only a readme file with some basic setup and configuration information but not a real "developer" guide.
I hope to have at least a basic frame for the documentation in the next few days and then start growing from it.
Thanks for the advice though!
Like always... Excellent work! Do help us out with a bit more of documentation.
Cheers,
V.