Interest in a Lisp CMS?

[JamesF]

As my online store stuff develops, it's becoming increasingly clear to me that I'm in fact building a CMS with a shopping cart. Just thought I'd check for the general level of interest in such a thing - anybody want to leap on board once it coalesces?

Current bag of high-level features*:
- user-editable content pages
- product catalogue
- shopping cart
- integration with at least one credit-card processor
- blog
- news
- user profiles/login
- admin WUI

Oddly enough, it's not the features that's taking all the time - it's getting the right data model, and catching all the exceptions and edge-cases. At the moment, it's a couple of sites with a couple of libraries to make things easier, but I'm starting to see how the common features should be implemented. Consider this a really early heads-up.

*Disclaimer: not all these features may have been implemented yet, either fully or at all.

[AlexPaes]

That would be a very interesting project, i have in fact already thought about starting such a project but unfortunately the lack of spare time to work with CL has never allowed me to jump into it. I would very much like to get some more information about this project. I've been trying to push CL into my company's development tools but they are working with an existing open-source CMS and are afraid of the change, so this project could actually drive my company to make the switch.

[JamesF]

I would very much like to get some more information about this project. I've been trying to push CL into my company's development tools but they are working with an existing open-source CMS and are afraid of the change, so this project could actually drive my company to make the switch.

I think it'll be quite a while before this matures enough to displace anything already in place, but it's certainly worth aiming for - if it's worth doing at all, I may as well aim to get it right.

Where it is now: I've built, and am refining, fairly task-specific software that runs a couple of online gallery/shops. I generalise things where it looks feasible, which has produced a couple of libraries that I'm polishing for initial release.

One of the sites is for my partner who, though possessing at least as much aptitude as me, has no interest in getting into programming. I've already built functional-but-ugly admin interfaces, but now need to build the machinery needed for user-generated content in pages, blog-posts, blog comments and news articles. Plain text is easy enough, and will be the first iteration, but it'd certainly be nice to include something like BBCode... and it's at this point that it starts looking like a CMS.

So there's a good chunk of refactoring for me to do, because I'm a bit reluctant to publish the code as it is. There are a couple of big changes to be made yet: one is architectural, increasing the degree of object orientation; the other is design-related, moving from CL-WHO-based functions to HTML-TEMPLATE for the graphic design. The latter move should simplify and reduce the actual codebase significantly.

So I'm looking at releasing the initial rough version once it's become a generalised machine to which I feed config files. The nice thing about CL, of course, is that the config files themselves can be both valid CL and easy to understand and modify

[tayssir]

Definitely, I'm interested in such an app, particularly as it relates to online galleries and shops.

I'm right now fixing the mess which is a cowboy-coded PHP shoppingcart thingie, for a friend. In fact, I'm using Lisp to deal with the PHP codebase, removing all the cut 'n pasting and sticking it into an easily-editable template. I thought I was taking a break from Lisp, but...

[gozek]

I'm also interested in a Lisp CMS. I'm designing one myself, but if liked yours, we could maybe cooperate. Please publish something soon

[cable]

I would also be very interested in a Lisp CMS. Are you going to use something like UCW, or completely custom?

[JamesF]

I would also be very interested in a Lisp CMS. Are you going to use something like UCW, or completely custom?

I'm not much of a continuations fan, so it'll be based on Hunchentoot.

I'm also still thrashing out issues in the initial applications, so progress is dead slow at the moment - the price of reliability. From what I've seen of Hunchentoot 1.0, it'll be taking advantage of some of the new features in there, expanding on the logging system in particular. The other distinguishing aspect is that it's looking distinctly OO, as I think CLOS and Postmodern provide a fairly neat way of constructing a mix-n-match setup. I know I should use CLSQL for portability, but I much prefer Postmodern's approach.

*ahem*
Slow? Hell, I haven't finished writing a demo for the base library, yet. I have to say, though, that documenting a library is a damn fine way of forcing yourself to rethink your design decisions.

[hrapof]

As I'm doing essentially the same, I can say it would be very great to have such a beast ready off-the-shelf!
Just please beware of UCW/Weblocks plague: if you release something, make its examples work straight out of .tar.gz, and make them easy to adapt.

[skypher]

Weblocks would in fact be quite suitable for this since it works with and without AJAX.

Its usage of continuations is optional, too.

[skypher]

Just please beware of UCW/Weblocks plague: if you release something, make its examples work straight out of .tar.gz, and make them easy to adapt.

I'm not sure what version of Weblocks you have tried but the current stable version is easily installable via clbuild and comes with a nice example to run and work off.