New Project, BoB

Still trying to determine the best way to proceed with hosting my code and articles on the web.

I have used DotNetNuke for a large number of years and finding myself less happy with it as time progresses. I started using DotNetNuke at the very beginning when the original devs starting morphing Microsoft’s IBuySpyPortal into the behemoth it has become today.

Every version got bigger, and slower, and more complicated. There were a lot of bad coding decisions made at the very start, and the project is pretty much locked into them.  The current vision seems to be concentrating on ISP’s and resellers and giving them the ability to host multiple sites and generating revenues off of them.

I’ve followed along, and grudgingly upgraded and fought with it and developed work arounds to get my ideas and code across, but upgrading is turning into something I am starting to loath.

Been looking at all the alternatives as I am really too lazy to want to start something on my own and figure if I could find something that accomplishes 80% of my goals I could live with it, and I might weasel out and try an alternative or two, but I’ve pretty much made up my mind that something new has to be created.

Microsoft Applications are becoming more and more monolithic and losing their cool simplicity that they started out with. SharePoint is a Beast and I just don’t have the time or patience to work with it.

All the ASP.NET CMS’s seem pretty much the same. I’ll check out the new Orchard code and see if something can be done with that.

MyWebPages starter kit seems like the closest thing I am looking for.

What I want is a complete separation of code from the content. You install the WebApp and start tossing XML files into a Content folder and then you are done. Every page would be a separate XML file and the overall site would be a collection of those pages.

Online WYSIWYG editing is not a real priority, I’d rather just edit something locally and then upload it. A little edit client would be nice, possibly in later versions.

Performance is a secondary concern for me. But I think the WebApp could compile the XML file and render out the HTML code and that owuld make things pretty responsive.

Look and feel would be handled with standard technologies, such as CSS and Themes, no ultra fancy skins are dynamic UI’s.

So i decided to keep a blog of my activities as I determine a feature set and start building Bob.