Stephen Yeargin

It took a few months longer than I had hoped, but my open source project is finally ready for “Beta” release. No, I will not be doing the Google-esque launches, where things never really leave beta, but rather continue to shop this idea around to developers looking to add another, or even his or her first, project to a resume. In other words, collaboration is key.

For a bit of back-story, PacerCMS is a re-tooling of Content Manager, the generic name of a CMS I wrote while on vacation in North Carolina. It adds a few new features onto the already stable backbone of a system that runs an award winning student newspaper‘s Web site. Inter Pares, the University of Ottawa’s School of Law’s student newspaper, has earned two distinctions: for being the first production site to use PacerCMS, and to also be the first one outside of the United States.

I started the project because, at the time, I was unable to find a CMS that worked well for a college newspaper Web site. Even when I began considering updating the system, I still could not find a straightforward solution that met the needs of the newspaper.

There are still a couple of issues that need to be ironed out. For example, the templating system for the front-end requires the end user to know quite a bit of PHP to make it not be another iteration of The Pacer‘s Web site. Secondly, if you are not using mod_rewrite to handle HTTP requests, most of the links will fail. Such is the case when the included .htaccess file is ignored. I am looking into a permalink setting, a la WordPress. Inter Pares‘s webmaster Dan McConville has had his hands full getting their site up and running, but I am really proud to see it in action.

Going along with the community aspect of open source, I want feedback and/or volunteers. Selfish I know, but I honestly work on things like this so that they may make the users’ (most likely the webmaster of a student or community newspaper) life a bit easier. If this project interests you, shoot me an e-mail and I would be thrilled to get you in on the ground level.