| This is a really cool niche... and I love the idea of it being more generally applicable or extensible to the kinds of private collections of objects that the writer is describing. (I really like what the article seems to be arguing for). It seems like the data storage / search / filtering aspects of your software would be really fun and interesting to develop flexible solutions to. The Wordpress aspects probably wouldn't be so fun to maintain, but it's always pick-your-poison when it comes to CMSs unless you develop your own in-house. That being said, a collection CMS doesn't necessarily need to have all the plugins and doodads that a Wordpress site does. It could be something bare-bones and extensible that was written to be more tightly coupled to a layer that interpreted the underlying data structure. Just toying with the idea, maybe even something that flattened the data views of the collection into static webpages for deployment so that at least some of the indexing could be handled by naming conventions and directory structure without recourse to database searches. The world could definitely use an open source kit along these lines, with a GUI backend that would let non-developers build their own table structure and search parameters, draw up some page layouts, and just generate a searchable site that collated CSV records with images. Some of this actually reminds me of what HyperCard could do... it allowed some really interesting experiments with user-classified data. Like this, from 1989:
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/225955134.pdf Relational stuff is hard, as you say, but in a structure built around a collection it seems like you could come up with a DSL that defined which columns needed to relate to other tables (any column with repeating data, for instance), suggest making that column "normalized", and automatically generate a linked table. |