At work, we have a bunch of in-house written, from-scratch (more or less), software. As we're a software house, this isn't terribly surprising, you might think.
However the software I'm talking about isn't the stuff we sell. It's the basic code that holds up the website. There's an entire self-written CMS, forms system, publishing system and a host of other things. Most of this stuff evolved, from simple CGI scripts written years ago, relying on text files and databases and so on. Some of those .cgi scripts even still exist in remote corners.
Larger and frequently used systems have been refactored into more hands-off tools, optimised for minimal maintenance.
Smaller systems languish, seemingly not enough used to refactor and improve. And yet they waste the time of us workers, more than we'd like.
Managements idea is to replace everything with some off-the-shelf pre-written software, and all will be good. This is of course somewhat of a pipe-dream, one which the people actually running that project are quite aware of. It will need customising, of course.
So there's two extremes: Software we've written from scratch, and software we just install, or pay for hosted. Where is the in-between layer? I'm thinking what we need more of is mostly-done solutions, components. Things like Catalyst plugins and similar come close, but even those are often self-contained. How do I integrate, for example, MojoMojo (wiki) and Angerwhale (blog) so that both use the same user source? Ok, those are both classed as complete applications, but that's my problem. I want them as parts of a whole.
Anyway, all this rambling, what I actually want to get started on is:
We have a system for writing forms, another one that builds a calendar of events, and a third that stores training courses and their dates/prices. None of these integrate with the other, and they're all updated by hand, that is, by programmers, not by people running the events/trainings.
After stumbling around the internet for a while looking for a plausible off-the-shelf solution, I decided to just write one (this is how frustrating finding software has become..) I did find a couple of not too terrible sounding ones, but they appear to be all hosted. For eg: Tendenci, which is actually part of a CMS.
So far I've managed to write a simple (i.e. not terribly normalised, but sufficient to reproduce existing systems) DB schema, and a somewhat bare Catalyst app. Now I need to make an admin interface/controller, and one to actually display the events list and the sign-up forms.
@public,perl,ironman
Last modified: 2009-05-13T17:10:23