I get sick of building web sites sometimes. HTML is so boring and obtuse, and server-side includes alleviate only a little of the tedium. Yeti Arts, the web design company I co-founded with a few friends, has several clients whose sites I update on a regular basis. And when those sites are in HTML, it makes the whole maintenance process very unrewarding.

One weekend I got inspired to build myself a content management tool. So I sat down and pounded out a simple blogging tool that I named, imaginatively, YetiBlogSite.

Process

Using everything I'd learned about web site and user interface design, content management, and programming up to that point, I composed the code in Zope (which uses DTML and Python) for a simple tool that would:

• Allow me to change all the stylesheet and formatting information in a single web form
• Use a simple hierarchical structure to build the entire site:
  • YetiBlogSite: a container object to hold everything else
    • YetiBlog: another container object used for structure
      • YetiBlogEntry: individual text, image, and data-bearing objects
• Require very little HTML coding
• Generate sophisticated navigational structures, such as menus, breadcrumbs, and sequential browsing.
• Provide minimally customizable sorting, layout, and graphic design capabilities

As evidenced by this YetiBlog-based portfolio, YetiBlogSite does all this... and not much more. And yet it is most likely one of the most useful tools I have ever built.

Reflection

YetiBlogSite works so well probably because it is so simple. I created a blank, default YetiBlogSite for my brother, who knows little to no HTML and let him go at it. Within a month, he had blogs for his photos, his resume, and his journal (which is read frequently by his friends and family). It seems unlikely he could have done the same with zBento.

I think I learned that sometimes -- maybe most of the time -- less is more. I'm not sure how all this fits into this portfolio, but I felt that it was worth a mention because, as I mentioned above, this very site was built with YetiBlogSite.

What's Next

I am constantly refining YetiBlogSite -- making it simpler, more reliable, and more intuitive. As with most things built in Zope, it's open source, so the export file is available for download and modification below.

Artifacts

• YetiBlogProduct .zexp file (Requires Zope. To install, import into /Control_Panel/Products in Zope installation)