VIDEO: Building a feature-rich website with the Lotus Domino CMS

07/20/2009 04:05 PM by Chris Toohey

Just how functional do our websites need to be? Do they need to have a database engine running the website? Does my home page need to question whether it's the home page every time it's loaded?!

These are questions that I'd asked myself when I started re-writing this website. Now while I still intend to use Lotus Notes/Domino to build and maintain, I quite frankly didn't want the overhead and lag associated with rendering what basically is a very simple website.

And that's where the Lotus Domino CMS comes in! This new build project that I'm hoping to deliver this week will allow you to maintain all media, common markup components, and all markup (xhtml, xml, css, javascript, etc.) in a NotesDatabase. The HTTP stack delivering the pages? Well, that's up to you!

See, with this approach, you can write to any FTP, WEBDAV, or CURL-enabled directory. This allows you to not only publish your content to non-Domino HTTP engines, but also allows you to enable a development and publication "best practices" and workflow within your organization.

Again, I plan on releasing this template this week, and in releasing I plan on publishing it to OpenNTF.org for immediate download.

That being said, get your suggestions and requests in for features and functionality ASAP and I'll do my best to have them on the initial release build!