Phyrax Blog

Yes it’s true, I have embarked on a wild journey into CMS stardom. Needless to say, I really don’t know where to begin. For years I’ve looked for the right software to simply do an online portfolio, or ePortfolio/eFolio, that was simple to design, setup, and manage. Well I obviously never found that software, granted yes, I have found some software, but it’s either stripped down bare necessities or it’s just not what I want. Some friends of mine over at LinkedIn suggested that I simply use, “WordPress with custom theme and plug-ins” (Azizur Rahman) Why not? Well the real reason is I want something that belongs to me, I want something free, I want simplicity, I want something written by my fingers, the blood on my keyboard, I want it made my way.

Red Mantis seeks to simplify the users experience and broaden the usability of the applications. Mantis will be using software of the utmost quality and speed. I’m looking into ADODB which is a database abstraction library which allows the usability of multiple database types such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Interbase, Firebird, Informix, Oracle, MS SQL and a few others. Now granted this is the backend, and the end user will never know what’s going on, but I’m just using this for functionality.

On the template and styling side of things, Red Mantis will be simple for even the most noob-ish of html coders. Default templates will be coded in xHTML and validated to perfection to ensure cross browser compatibility. Now this goes without saying that others will be able to make their own templates with the ease of simple xHTML and the Smarty Template Engine. Smarty will enable programmers like me to separate the PHP from the template to prevent destruction of the back end code. This also breaks down the template in simple files, maybe even just two, who knows!

My intentions on templates is to give the ability to customize the full site, and any widgets along with the AJAX drag and drop, Lightbox Imaging, GD2 Watermarking, and other standard features that are already incorporated in most online software. The Red Mantis project team will be looking at software that is already released to get a general idea of what people look for and what we consider functional, currently we are looking at the following online applications:

• Wordpress
• Joomla
• phpBB Olympus

We are also currently looking into the following websites for ideas also:

• Big Black Bag
• Carbonmade
• FolioSnap
• Qfolio

There are many other features we look to incorporate into Red Mantis, but we want to work on functionality first, when it works, we’ll add features. The intention is also to let end users write their own plug-ins and simply place them into their own directory for Mantis to recognize.

I know this is boasting a lot of hype here, but just image, what if you had your own software to do what you wanted it to do, and it’s FREE? I mean, you can’t beat that. Now I’m not saying that this software will accommodate everyone’s needs, I just want it to be something that you can see yourself using.

Filed under: Projects, Red Mantis on May 1st, 2008