Building a CMS with XML, XSLT, Ant, and ImageMagik

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 11:37:30 -0400

Not so long ago a freelance client approached me with some updates for their website. The site has been growing organically since 2000 and therefore was a big mess. Several attempts to port the site to a CMS driven system failed largely because those CMS systems are usually to complex for our needs (Typo3) or not flexible enough (Joomla, WordPress). So as I was faced with updates to all the updates including image updates which in turn needed thumbnails to be generated. The same day I stumbled randomly over the xsl:result-document function in XSLT 2.0 which allows you to transform a single XML file into several output files. That sparked an idea with me: why not use that to build a CMS system using XML technologies? I’ve toyed around with Cocoon a couple of years ago but that was not what I was looking for. So I looked for other technologies…

XSLT2.0 on ilikeorangutans

Building a CMS with XML, XSLT, Ant, and ImageMagik