Jerry,

The CMS is custom coded, originally in PHP3, but it has been slowly (and in places partially) upgraded as PHP progressed. Much is now true OO-style PHP5, but much of it is unfortunately not. It is at least fully PHP5-compliant now with all deprecated coding rewritten.

I'm afraid the site is closed source.

It would not be a good example to copy anyway. In particular the Object-Relation mapping layer is largely non-existent in places. I have been meaning to replace it with a generated-code layer, especially as I have written several tools that do exactly that, one in Java, one in C# and more recently in PHP5. The "Schema Compiler" is a bit of a magnum opus for me, maybe one day I'll clean-room rewrite it and make it open-source. Its steady improvement over the various implementations have proven quite useful in many projects.

The approach you've taken with your site is quite similar to the internals of mine by the looks of it. I devised a wiki markup-like language for the textual stuff which references non-text assets like images and videos via an opaque integer unique ID. The article to asset relation is strongly maintained in the DB, but the markup can cross-link other articles assets. It is possible but expensive to machine-parse the markup and extract the full object graph, but I don't bother. The asset ownership by a single article is mainly an editorial convenience. Duplication is pretty minimal in practice.

At present the non-textual assets are in the DB as well. This is part blessing, part nightmare. It makes the site easy to backup, the code is already in source control (CVS), and that along with a dump of the DB is sufficient to reconstruct the site completely. However the sheer size of the datastructures is growing towards arbitrary limits (file system file limit in particular due to the vintage of Linux kernel on the production host).

Keeping the site running is a hobby in itself. With the large amount of non-textual asset content (video in particular), the bandwidth requirements continue to grow. It already consumes more than 20 Gig a month. Fortunately the costs of bandwith drop too, but the on going costs are something I have to be a little careful about.

Regards,

Alan

I like your site very much, the content the style etcetera. I would like to know how you programmed it or which CMS you use. If it is possible i would also like to install your CMS on my server because the stuff i have now is asciidoc markup language which generated html static content.

Regards,

Jerry Jacobs