IAmKevin.CA

Welcome to my new homepage, now powered by Plone, a powerful enterprise CMS running on the Zope framework!

Why did I decide to change over to a run-of-the-mill standard publication platform over building and running my own?

Great question!  While I do really enjoy developing software and programs on my spare time, and will still probably do so.  One problem I've kept noticing, especially about trying to build out something more public facing like a blog, CMS, or website, is that it can actually take a lot to do it all right.  In our modern world with a lot of cyber-security issues, this also means that I need to ensure that I keep up with every potential security issue that might arise.  As you can imagine if I build my stuff from scratch on the web for a public facing audience, this can lead to potential issues down the road.  Furthermore, while I can create websites and such, I'm clearly not the best at it.  My climax was reached during my Django days of yore, where I was able to create amazing websites incredibly quickly using it's framework.  It is also Python-based, just like Plone here is.  However, after the release of Python 3, and the sheer amount of Django websites that I did build, which had a lot of custom apps, it became a huge maintenance headache, and as a result I actually abandoned Python as my primary language, essentially out of spite.  It was really annoying at how much of my time and effort went into building all of these amazing Python 2 packages and programs, only to be forced to rewrite it all.  It was too much at the time for me to bare, so I just looked around at other languages which have a better track record of keeping their backwards compatibility in tact.  I eventually settled on Object Pascal, which also allows me to developer cross-platform desktop application with ease, which was a huge bonus.  Each new release, my Pascal code will still compile without any issues or any huge code changes, which is what I prefer.  As you might have guessed by now, there is no super amazing web framework in Object Pascal, and I've tried to piece things together over the years, but nothing super user-friendly.

Why Plone though?

Another great question!  I oddly feel in love with how Zope worked back in the mid-2000s when I first dived into Linux.  I have this weird obsession with file systems, and file management in general that I still don't fully understand...  Zope sort of scratches this itch very nicely for me.  Unlike traditional publication platforms, Zope supports full folder and file hierarchies for managing content.  As a result of Plone using Zope, it also shares a lot of this as well.  Plone doesn't seem to directly use the ZODB like a traditional Zope web application might, but Plone still does manage it's content in a hierarchy.  As this website is further developed, you'll soon see how all this actually works in practice, and why I prefer it over traditional flatter blog and CMS systems.  I will be writing many posts soon about these aspects.

What's Next?

All these amazing questions today!  Well, I'll first need to further configure this Plone instance with some custom content-types that I'd like to have, and then add various sections that I'd like to see.  I choose not to use the example data, and so I will need to create a lot of these sections by hand and personalize them as I need them.  Which is another nice feature of both Zope and Plone, are the custom content-types which can be easily created.