One of the reasons I've written my Domino CMS engine - which I hope to demo sometime this week - was that I've been playing around with a new purpose if you will. Specifically, I want to take it from blog to online resource. Mind you, I'll still be running the site. And there will still be a weblog as a part of this site... but I want it to be more. I think - after all these years - it needs to be more. So I thought that I would outline a few of the features here while I'm adding them to the site (as well as ask for suggestions and requests).

First, the site - as mentioned - will run on my Domino CMS engine. What this means is that the website will no longer be viewed from a NotesDatabase (and this site is today), but rather maintained and generated from a NotesDatabase. Yep, the Domino CMS engine creates end-result files - such as XML, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc. - based on the content and "configuration" of the Domino CMS NotesDatabase. This allows me not only complete control over what's rendered, but will infinitely speed up the delivery of content. At least... that's the plan.

The site will contain the following sections: my Weblog, Articles, Reviews, Examples & Downloads, Upcoming Events, and my Drawing Board.

My Weblog will continue, but I plan on expanding it. For those of you connected to me on Facebook, you'll note that I often post things to my profile (such as Lotus community news, upcoming Lotus community events, various geek-related content, etc.) that just don't quite make it to this site. I plan putting more content on the weblog, but specifically making it more my weblog than a community information and development tips repository. Hopefully that makes sense...

The more detailed content will go into the Articles, Reviews, and Examples & Downloads sections. Here I'll host My Gear product reviews, detailed topics and development deep-dives, and I'll be putting more demos, examples, and usable product out there for consumption.

The Drawing Board... that will be a microsite containing all of my one-off development endeavors and I wonder if... type of content. Sure, you'll see errors in your browser and all sorts of ugliness with these half-baked (or still-baking in most cases) solutions, but I think that will help a lot of people see how someone in their field does things...

Events. Simply put, this community is starting to have more and more online and real world/physical events to help spread the good/yellow word. The problem is, not many people know what's going on, when, where, etc. I plan on providing a simple click-to-add facility of community events using iCalendar as a cross-platform standard.

There was a concern from some of the early-reviewers of my Domino CMS engine regarding comments. Specifically, how would I handle a submitted content against a particular post if my CMS was not externally facing?

There were multiple options - the best being a specific NotesDatabase that handled a comment submission and proxied it to my Domino CMS, which I didn't like. So as I planned to use Google Friend Connect to allow you to join this site, I thought I would simply use their Comments engine. Why re-write the wheel, right?

A few other features will include some things that you see on other sites today: a mini-feed of my latest Twitter updates, various galleries, an implementation of ShareThis! and countless other nice-to-haves that I've been wanting to get on DominoGuru.com for a long time now.

Are there features that you would like to see in this space? Different categories that I might be overlooking? Make yourself heard in the comments (which are still a part of this NotesDatabase design)!

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!

I've put together a simple little teaser video that shows off the RenderKit architecture for the Lotus Notes Domino CMS I'm currently working on and plan to use to host not only this site, but also a few pro-bono websites I'm putting together.

Once complete, I plan on publishing the Lotus Notes Domino CMS to OpenNTF.org, so if you have any comments, questions, and suggestions, please feel free to comment in this post!

One of the projects that I'm working on requires the creation of a Lotus Notes Domino-based content management system. With this Lotus Notes Domino CMS, I plan on not only running the two project websites in question but also this site (www.dominoguru.com). All sites require some basic content management with a mind to incremental updates once the website "design" is finalized.

It's with that in mind that I'm using (what I'm referring to as) renderkits for the markup blocks within the application.

There are 2 main types of actual content NotesDocuments in my CMS at this time: documents and events.

Each of these NotesDocument types contain actual data, while the other types of NotesDocuments simply tell the CMS what to do with the data.

content NotesDocuments are used to create static blocks of content - such as the inclusion of Google Friend Connect or the PlanetLotus.org Blog Widget, which will be unique-keyed and can be used throughout the website.

The renderkits allow you to define a unique key, selection criteria, formula template, and count attributes - all of which will be used to create evaluated subsets of documents and events content markup.

An Agent runs against all active renderkits, using the search criteria to grab a NotesDocumentCollection against the CMS, and - using the Formula as a "template", does a simple Mail Merge-like meld of the NotesDocumentCollection content into the desired format... which is then saved en masse into the Body NotesItem for that given renderkit.

Pretty standard stuff as far as a CMS goes... but I had a simple question: should I allow for the definition of pre and post Body NotesItems in the renderkit; allowing the prefix and suffixing of content in the Body NotesItem?

My knee-jerk reaction was sure, why not!... but the more and more I think about it I'm not too sure.

See, for the intended usage scenarios, I will be using a Page NotesDocument to marry the content and the renderkit into the intended delivered content. I can define prefix and suffix information in the page as needed without worry.

Of course I imagine that there's no harm in adding it really... but that's where I turn to you:

And feel free to give your thoughts beyond the poll in the comments of this post (and thanks!).