README

Pidoco as CMS (an experiment)

This project is an experiment. When sketching the wireframes for the brand new website http://forkmerge.com I was impressed by the speed with which you can create usable website with pidoco. I created a complete website with all pages and texts within one and a half hours (OK the texts still need some polish though). Two years ago I needed for similar job a couple of days. So I got curious how it would be to use Pidoco as a CMS for ForkMerge. I downloaded the HTML export of my prototype and directly deployed them as static files on my web server and "bang" I had a complete website.

Apart from being seriously quickly developed the deployed prototypes have a couple of downsides which I tried to correct by creating a script performing an after productions.

I want to thank my friend Gregor Schmidt (@schmidtwisser) for helping me out with some ruby basics. Further I want to thank Volker Gersabeck (Co founder of Pidoco GmbH) for his curiosity, assistance and support with his profound knowledge of the Pidoco core and with his system insights.

The current after production script could solve the following issues:

• The JavaScript based browser fork in index.html was replaced by a simple index.php which forwards to the prototypes homepage (page0001). This makes it easier for google to find the actual pages.
• The pages' title was replaced to not have Pidoco but ForkMerge as title.
• The favicon.ico of Pidoco was replaced by another one.
• The sketeched.css file was extended to change the pages' background as I wanted to give the page a partly less sketched look and to give it more colors.

The following issues could be solved in future but I did not find the time yet:

• The URLs could look nicer having replacing the page's ID by its name instead.
• The page could use a different font apart from the hate loved Comic Sans by using web fonts for instance. You need to pay special attention to the line breaks that Pidoco inserts into your text fields. You might want to remove them as they make life hard when using wider fonts. Pidoco inserts these line breaks to assure that the line breaks in the authoring environment (using Arial) corresponds to the line breaks in the generated prototype (using Comic Sans).

The following issues I did not know how to solve properly yet:

• From a SEO point of view the Pidoco prototypes are not optimal at all. For instance spiders do not know what is a headline and what is simple text. Even the order of text fields on the page does not automatically be the same order in the source code.
• Further it is currently not possible to link selected words within a text field to an URL. This makes writing texts like blog entries rather inconvenient.

Usage instructions

• Change the pathes to directories used in after_production.rb to suit your needs.
• Add your background image and favicon.ico.
• Adapt after_production.rb to replace the pages' titles in a way that serves your needs.
• Keep in mind that you might need to add another mime-type to your web server's config. Please consult the README file that Pidoco delivers with your downloaded prototype.