My time of dabbling and dawdling with HTML, CSS, and server-side scripting are potentially yielding me some business. Two seperate friends of mine have been talking with me about building websites for them. They’re both hobbyist craftspersons, and they need sites that are beyond the basic “business card” site. They need galleries, user authentication, project dossiers with potential sales linkage, news/blogging functionality, as well as the usual Contact, FAQ, About, and Links pages.
It excites me that I get to build these sites. It’s been over 6 years since I built my last for-pay site for a tattoo-artist friend back home. So it’ll be swell to get my hands back into the code and do some good stuff. Hopefully it’ll all work out well, and that I can learn something while I’m doing it.
That’s every designer’s hope, I guess.
The technological solution I have my eye on is called Maypole. It’s a Perl-based solution, very similar (according to the documentation) to Java Struts or, as I can figure, Ruby On Rails. It’s a generic application framework that, in its default unmodified state, provides basic methods and templates to manipulate and display data in a database. Its design paradigm is that of Model-View-Controller, and as such is based on the expansive Class::DBI package for the data model and the powerful Template Toolkit for the view.
By default, Maypole will Do The Right Thing: the basic application can be had with the only cost to the programmer being 20 lines of code. Expanded functionality can be done for a bit more work.
I’m currently reading through the documentation and learning more about it. I’ve messed with it a little bit; got the sample application up and running, hacked it enough to make it run well on my laptop without Mod_Perl installed. There are plenty of other coders who are messing with Maypole – it’s still in active development. So it looks like a good fit for what I’m needing.
It’s my hope that Maypole is a good fit, and that I can use it to build these sites to the standards of usability, power, and flexibility that my customers want and that I’ve been blathering on about for years.