Website refactored
During the last few weeks I have revamped most of my website's backend. The new version is online now, and you hopefully don't see any difference, because that was not my intention. Instead I replaced the original CMS with my own scripts and modernized some other stuff.
Originally I used AMMMa's Community Web as the Content Management System (CMS) for my website. But it turned out to be oversized for the few pages of my virtual home. Beside that it is written in Perl and required some fancy RPC calls to integrate the Horde modules I used. That was an interesting exercise and proved the Horde Framework's SOAP/XML-RPC interface to be stable and functional, but it also added overhead to each page request.
Instead I use Gollem's (Horde's file manager) editing capabilities to manage and edit the pages of my website in a virtual filesystem (VFS). A single script reads the pages from the VFS backend and integrates Jonah (news generator and reader), Agora (forum application, providing comment capabilities) and Ansel (photo gallery).
This new architecture has some advantages:
- Easier and seemless integration of the various PHP-only components
- Only one request per page view, no more RPC calls
- Nicer URLs with URL rewriting
- CAPTCHAs are working more reliable now
