JohnBs personal blog

just to prove it’s not all rumour and HarmonyLT does really exist, here are some screen shots of the admin (alpha code!)

I blogged yonks ago about a project I was working on Harmony, a Fusebox based content management system.

I’ve since stopped development on that as it was getting a little bloated, so i’ve started on a new project HarmonyLT.

My aim for HarmonyLT is a lightweight Fusebox4 based content management system for lightweight sites that require dynamic updating, security and page approval. It’s not a full blown CMS/App framework like CommonSpot or Shado - it’s aimed at smaller sites that require updating by non techy users and only basic dynamic content. I have a stable code base now and am shortly sending my first HarmonyLT site live, here (some links won’t work!)

FuseQ was great for folks doing content management. Yes, you could do the same thing in Fusebox3 but it took a little more effort. It’s extremely easy to harness the power of Fusebox 4 to leverage it for use in a content management system

Harmony started life out as a mini CMS project in early 2001 just because I’d never written one and i thought it was about time i did. In 2002 I presented at the Fusebox Conference with a session on ‘Content management with Fusebox’ and in those days i was calling it ‘myCMS’. Harmony was the code name of another project I’m very close to, Microsoft’s Media Centre 2004 - which is now in production (or at least OEMs can sell it) so i thought i’d leech the name

Harmony came about because the company i work for refused to spend $30,000 on a Commonspot license to CMS our public facing web site, preferring to let our webmaster (not me) manually edit over 1500 static HTML files with our new corporate web image whenever it changed (6 monthly). It was intended more as a proof of concept but over the years i’ve constantly been playing with the code and it’s now turning out to be a pretty neat ‘demo app’ (yet to be used in production I hasten to add).

Originally starting as a FuseQ application, I’ve recently updated the core engine to use Fusebox4, I’ll be convering a number of the core changes i needed to make to move from FuseQ to Fusebox 4 but it was a relatively painless experience.