Monday, November 21, 2011

The Red Pill

During 2009-2010, I worked on implementing, launching and supporting the Matrix CMS at the NGV. Matrix is a GPL-licensed, CMS written in PHP, produced by an Australian company Squiz.

While on the surface, Matrix looks like just another of the multitude of CMS's available, it incorporates a number of very powerful concepts that make it very flexible and closer to full blown web development platforms such as RoR and Helma. I want to write about some of those features here. I'll be looking at Matrix from the point of view of a web developer instead of just reviewing its "feature checklist" and I'll also try to look at its benefits from the view point of web designers and content managers as well as a web developer.

To give this series of posts some context, I'll look at how Matrix is used at the NGV on the newly re-launched NGV Collection Online. In the first post, I'll cover some background to the project and issues that need to be considered when "porting" a custom-built web application into a Matrix implementation.


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