The CMS now supports full categorization for writing pieces, and now all that's left in that department is do add a tool to manage catergories and descriptions.  This opens up the doors for also adding tags to blogs and tutorials as well.

Before, the catergories I had were hard-coded and I could select from 4 presets that were in there temporarily.  Now, the writings.php pahe is completely dynamic - it displays each writing piece as long as it is marked as "published", and even further, it lists it by catergory with the catergory description as well.  This is a great step forward, even if it doesn't look much different on the front end.

I've given a lot of thought into how I will eventually need to allow for themes, but honestly as daunting as that is, it's nowhere near as frightening as finding a secure way to update the raw php files on a remote server when I add functionality for updates.  Luckily many of the other CMS systems out there are open source, and I should be able to scour the files to see how things are done elsewhere.

Categorization

Finally getting around to polishing the front-end of the CMS for my site - it's taken a while because the back-end scripting has been quite a challenge recently.  One direction I've been considering is basically packaging the code for use in a multitude of applications, and potentially even releasing it in some form.  While the release would be a ways away, I'm surely documenting the hell out of the scripts that are rendering everything, and giving myself tools, whether or not I personally would truly benefit.

WordPress was inspiring to me, but it certainly has limitations.  I worked with it for quite a while, even developing plugins and such, but I want to create an engine one day that might even exceed it in some ways.  Once this portfolio is "completed", I have a few uses in mind - a few people who need similar capabilities.  I'll test it in the wild for a bit, get some feedback, and of course have an "update" functionality embedded into the dashboard that will allow me to add or update functionality for the future.  WordPress was certainly not built in a day, nor by a single guy, so creating something "better" isn't my primary goal.  The software is what it is - a very advanced blogging platform.  My direction would be very different, and blogging would simply be an included feature.

Unfortunately, most of this site's design was hard-coded, and as it stands only the content is dynamic.  To become fully customizable, everything needs to be dynamic.  This sounds easier than it is, and as always, this is simply one of many projects I have going on.

I'm making an effort to make my own posts more and more often, if for no other reason than simply to test things out.  My TinyMCE based blogging/writing tool most recently now allows for image uploads and spell checking, so I'm hoping my posts will be less hassle as well :P