This past week Amazon announced their new static site service using s3. After reading a few reviews and technical how-tos I was reminded of an old project that my friend, and former coworker, Stan Harris and I
worked on but got shelved. If this service had been around back then I do believe our project would have been green lit.
worked on but got shelved. If this service had been around back then I do believe our project would have been green lit.
Do to the success of the many open source CMS's (Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, MODx) everyone, no matter how big or small your website is, assumes that they have to have a content management system. It isn't just small businesses that preach this mantra, but big corporations as well. Over the years I have come to realize that in most instances going with a content management system or blogging platform is really lighting a grill with an atom bomb.
There is an emerging market growing for those "in-between" scenarios where using anything from Wordpress to some "god-awful" behemoth like Vignette is just not the right fit for managing a user's or business's website. Let's be honest, the majority of the pages for your site are static anyway so why NOT serve up static pages.
Time to get back to basics.
I do not expect most people, especially content editors, to spend their days managing html tags for these static pages, but that is where AWS and NoSQL come into play. This philosophical approach to managing content is nothing revolutionary, but the reason that it has never taken off is due to the fact that all the technological pieces weren't there. There has to be a way for the content to be managed, but installing, maintaining and scaling a relational database is a nightmare. Most of the noSQL families are built from the ground up with these features in mind.
Someone needs to develop a SIMPLE CMS that allows for the management of content from a backend system, let's use CouchDB as an example, and when an article is published you write out the static template to AWS.
For those pages where you have to have some dynamic/server-side driven module, just include that in another content-type template. All the caching strategies and plugins in the world are not going to speed up your web server and make it run as lean as possible as just letting your web server do what it does best....server up static pages. Not to mention that by using AWS you have instant scalability on an infrastructure that is as reliable as it is going to get.
Since there is still a backend management app, the content-editor will still be able to run reports, add in taxonomy, etc. Granted, in this noSQL CMS there is more upfront development, but it is a solution that will fit one's business needs without being overly complex. Just because Wordpress and Joomla are "easy to install" doesn't mean that the additions and maintenance are.