Over-drive: Working on a CMS for phalacee.com

Using phpMyAdmin to update the news on my site is getting old. I really need to build myself a full CMS for this site.

At first I was considering using Joomla! or Wordpress, but neither of them meet the requirements I have for phalacee.com.

So it looks like I'll be heading down the custom built CMS path - again.

Yes, I know that custom built CMS are fairly simple, I've made half a dozen already, but making one that looks good is a different story.

You maybe asking, "You'll be the only one seeing the CMS for phalacee.com, so what difference does it make if it doesn't look good?" Well, I've adopted a new mentality - if its worth doing, its worth doing right.

I'll have to use and look at the CMS day in and day out, so I want it to look great, stunning infact. Wouldn't be surprised if the CMS gets more attention than the whole of phalacee.com's frontend.

I have a few ideas in mind as to the design direction I want to go. The bulk of the ideas stem from the GUI of Ubuntu Studio. I really, really like the looks of the desktop graphics, they seem to have taken inspiration from Vista and Mac OS X, and although I am hesitant to install Vista on my machine at home, I do like it's UI.

I'll be posting some tutorials dealing with the steps I take in building the CMS - definitely some CSS tutorials detailing how I managed to 'skin' the default browser interface to look like the Ubuntu Studio buttons, tickboxes, and drop-downs. I'll probably release some php classes too, login handlers, etc.

Anyway, I have a few pages left to write for an End User Manual that goes with the CMS I built for a client, so I had better get back to it.