Jason Earl
Personal Website
PORTFOLIO
TypeFace Publisher
Overview
TypeFace is a hybrid between a web based CMS and small API that can sit on top of Ruby on Rails that allows web developers to craft custom CMS (Content Management System) applications for their clients, thus making it easy to create a custom interface to allow clients to modify their own website.
The problem existing CMS packages
Having used a number of CMS programs myself, I have come to realise that the abstraction of a general purpose CMS is often to high, and tends leak (see ‘Joel on Software’ Article about leaky abstractions). At the same time, in my job as a web developer I found myself constantly running into situations where clients would like to modify their own site without the associated learning curve that comes with well-recognised products such as Drupal. On top of this one Bailey Marine, one of my web clients wanted to be able to export the their web site to CD either using XHTML or PDF for their trade shows.
A lot of CMS packages for managing websites are very intrusive and require you to code you website round the architecture of the CMS. This is a clumsy concept for those who wish to adopt a CMS for a large website. TypeFace instead works as a publishing system that generates the files and uploads them via FTP (or another protocol such as rSync if you wish). The beauty with this design is that the target web server does not need to support any fancy scripting technologies as the publisher creates static files. This makes it much easier to integrate TypeFace into existing websites
Current Status
TypeFace is still an extensive testing process before it is due to be released. However I have plans to make this an Open Source / OSS project in the not too distant future.
Out of the box TypeFace will be able to act like a very privative CMS, much like Mambo, or Radiant. However it’s extensible API approach will make it easy for web developers to customise the system according to client needs.
Currently TypeFace is used to create this web site and the Bailey Marine website / PDF product catalogue.
Technology Used
- Client Side: XHTML 1.1 / CSS 2.1 / Prototype JS
- Design Work: Adobe Photoshop CS2
- Language: Ruby 1.8.6
- Framework: Rails 2.0
- Database: PostgreSQL 8.x, MySQL >= 4 or SQLite