Short summary of my CMS experiences, which goes back quiet far 😉

Greymatter (CGI-based) was my first news publishing tool I played with, it had an admin interface and allowed to template every aspect of the script. It allowed multiple users and had many little gadgets. My first community ran Greymatter. But Greymatter wasn’t modular enough for me, as I had to add each additional script by hand.

Well that was the time when PHP got popular (2000-2001) and I looked what else I could use to make my administrator life a bit easier. Tried myPHPNuke, played and left. It was my first contact with a PHP Blog / CM system.

Tried some other blogs on the way, but none really caught my attention, bad documentation, weak installation, weak functionality, small amount of extensions…….

That’s when I learned about PhpNuke, which really pushed my interest for PHP. Admin interface, blocks, modules, just what I was searching for. I ran my first community site with PHPNuke (http://www.i-trends.de), which was about windows shell replacements like Litestep or DesktopX.

I converted my hand coded html site to PhpNuke and started reading the code and extending it. Learned a bit by hacking, but that was not enough for me. Bought my first PHP Book and started learning. Liked the block feature from the start and started extending existing sideblocks. What I though was missing from the start, were sideblocks designed for usability not just for display. Started coding my own blocks and extending the first modules.

When the PostNuke fork was announced I was fast in jumping onto the new train, because the PhpNuke development somehow slowed me down. I had too many ideas and PhpNuke didn’t seem the right CMS to go with. I converted my site to Postnuke and worked with Patrick Kellum as a Beta Tester (I think he was a Postnuke dev at that time) on the first phpBB module integration and his advanced block system for Postnuke. I tested the forum and hacked it to fit my community needs at that time. That’s when my first i-blocks where born. i-blocks, because my site was called i-trends 😉

Moved with Postnuke until Jan 2002, when I had the feeling that development had ceased a bit. XOOPS was announced and I decided to test it and liked it from the start. A fresh development, with good ideas, easy administration, but there development didn’t follow my pace. I had to move on with developments and ideas so I rejoined Postnuke and developed for 0.7x now.

Joined the Postnuke Management & Development in April 2002 and worked as a core developer until the beginning of 2003. It was sad leaving such a great development team behind, but different management visions and the lack of time made me concentrate on my own work and developments over at portalZINE® again.

Have been working with different frameworks and content management systems ever since. Jumped on WordPress pretty early, around 2005. Using it more often since the REST API integration, as I love to use WordPress as a headless backend.