[Gsoc] Proposal: Flint, a simple Grok-based CMS

Luciano Ramalho luciano at ramalho.org
Mon Mar 31 12:57:14 EDT 2008


After some calendar juggling and partner negotiations, I've submitted
a proposal to participate in GSoC 2008 as a student with the Zope
Foundation.

Here is the abstract:

=======================
Flint is a pragmatic and light-weight CMS based on Grok which is
useful out-of-the-box, allows trivial customizations to be done
trivially, but showcases Grok best practices and therefore leverages
the flexibility and pluggability of the Zope Component Architecture to
allow deep customization and extension.

In order to be immediately useful, Flint follows the Plone lead by
providing ready to use content management and public interfaces.
However, Flint's content management interface is not embedded in the
public interface, for two reasons: to make it easier to customize one
interface without touching the other, and to avoid a single-hierarchy
mindset which is detrimental to current content management best
practices.

Besides Plone, Flint is inspired by three other pragmatic and
light-weight CMSs which aim for flexibility while remaining easy to
learn: Radiant (Ruby on Rails, see http://radiantcms.org/), Página-1
(a pre-CMF Zope Based CMS developed by Hiperlógica), and  Django,
which although is not a CMS comes quite close with it's powerful and
ready to use admin interface.

The Flint project recognizes that it is not the goal of Grok to be a
customizable web app, just as Zope 3 gave up this idea early on. Grok
and Zope 3 need to be generic frameworks for building web apps. But a
simple, customizable CMS built on top of Grok makes it easier to
demonstrate and provides beginning developers with a valuable starting
point for many common use cases. Having a simple Grok-based CMS ready
to use when Grok 1.0 launches can help to attract and retain more
users.

=======================


The full text of my proposal is here:

http://code.google.com/p/flint-cms/

Cheers,

Luciano


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