twistr blog

I'm posting this function I have had to write as struggled to find a decent one on the internet.

For the past few weeks I have been working on a project for a company with over 200 domains for their industry. This obviously is very expensive launch these individually; You need a designer to build each site by hand, a server guy to do the server things and the person who decides on the content and flow of the site.

So, being an avid tumblr user and desiring the ease of use it possesses, I decided to use it as a base for my CMS.

Tumblr has the main programming functions such as; If statements and variables/constants but was missing something fundamental. Options.

I built the rendering engine using the same syntax as tumblr {block:if this is true} etc. But had to create some new syntax for optional statements. Fuck me, this was a nightmare, I needed to fit the option, the value  and the outcome of this statement, as it returned a boolean (true or false)

So i came up with this {block:select,1,2,3|Pick a number,one,two,three=3}

Horrible I know.

So after the rendering engine was competed, well after it did what it was supposed to for now I started to build the templates. Differently to tumblr instead of having a single page template I had to create multiple templates for different page styles. The home page had to be different to the contact page and I also needed a page for information pages.

This is going to go on forever. To cut a seriously long story short. I built it. I supports themes like tumblr, runs on windows servers like tumblr does not and could be a really simple solution for information based sites wanting to use the easiest of easiest content management systems.