TextThing – The CMS That Does Less™

Published 15 November 04 by Justin French, 16 comments

Before we get down to business, I’ve gone with TextThing for a few reasons:

1. everything needs a name
2. the dot-com was available
3. it will possibly feel a like a “baby sister” to Textpattern
4. it ties in nicely with the TextDrive/Textpattern/TextMate network of friends, products and services that I’ve grown to respect immensely, and have found myself a little embedded in
5. it’s all about the text

In case you’re wondering, the target market is not strictly blogs, blogging and bloggers. It’s not intended to replace MovableType, WordPress or Textpattern. Sure, for some it will be an alternative, depending entirely on what it is they need.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. TextThing will be all about clean URLs. The builder of a TextThing site will carefully plan out a directory-like hierarchal structure to which the writers will place content.

Remember the way we used to build sites before the evil CMS came along? We’d layout a meaningful directory structure which reflected logical divisions in the content of the website. All the help pages were in /help/, all the product pages were in /products/, etc etc. It was great. It’s for this reason that TextThing will provide a means to logically organise content, and have this organisation reflected in a clean URL structure.

It’s nothing particularly new or revolutionary, but I feel it’s quite important, so it will remain near the top of my goals from beginning to end.

Where things become a little blurred is nesting. I can see why some people would want infinite nested sections or categories of information on their site (eg /books/technical/web/zeldman/), but the reality is this adds infinite complexity to both the code for the CMS and the mental model required to understand and use the thing.

I’m sure many of you will remember the early days when Textpattern users tried to get a grip on the relationship between sections, (nested) categories, articles, pages and forms.

So, what I’d like to know is how deep do you think I need to go? My gut reaction is to keep things simple – two levels of nesting (three if you include the article title). These can easily be mapped back to a /section/category/article-title/ model.

I can see plenty of examples on the web where this isn’t enough, but honestly, I can see more examples where it is enough, and for nearly every eight level nesting I see, I can usually find a simpler way around it.

But right now, I need to hear some feedback. I’m a sucker for “less is more”, but perhaps what I really need to say here is “more is more”.