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08/18/2005: "Finally some progress on my administration screens"

I have finally had a little time to get started on my administration screens. I talked a long time ago in my Oracle Security blog in a post titled "Oracle security and content management" about content management and administration functions for my web site and weblog. I have spent quite a lot of time looking at many Content Management Systems that are available (Thanks Sean for the tips!). I have never been able to pick out a particular system to use for my site as they all fall short of what i want (so far). I will talk again in a later entry about CMS systems and what i need in particular.

The one area I also wanted to cover with a CMS is the administration functions of my site, such as managing the mailing list, operating backups, generating and analysing web site statistics, sitemap and many more. At the moment I have a big bag of Perl CGI that does each task separately. I want to bring them all under one roof so that all admin is in a central location. I also wanted to bring to a central location access points to various other functions so that I don’t have to keep using bookmarks. This includes access to the blogs control panels and forum control panels. I have also registered some new sub-domains and also unlinked my other two sites www.petefinnigan.co.uk and www.petefinnigan.net from pointing at the Oracle Security Site.

So today I finally started to put together a list of the admin functions I need and started to create a single entry screen to access all of the functions. I am being lazy at first and doing the job as a cut and stitch of the existing scripts. I hope to alter this to a bespoke perl script in the future but for now this is the quickest solution and no one else sees it anyway.

I am hoping that this will make managing the site a little easier. I will talk again in the future about CMS's and why i couldn't find a suitable one and also I will let you know about my new sites which will all feature blogs of their own.