I’ve been doing some more Open Sourcery for the last few days, and I think it’s just about at a point where I’m happy writing about it now.

Noumenon is a content management system which tries to focus on the content, rather then it’s presentation. Currently it’s roughly equivalent to Jekyll or Toto, but without the blogging focus (although you could probably build a blog with it).

At the moment the key features that makes this different from every other Ruby based CMS are:

A focus on splitting content and it’s presentation

Content comes in the form of a YAML file, which is then transformed by templates within the site’s theme. Each template can specify which fields it supports, and which ones are required, with an error being thrown if the content you’ve written doesn’t provide all the required fields.

In the near future I’ll be providing an backend interface which can use the field metadata provided by a template to generate forms for creating and editing the content within your site.

 Simple Themeing

Themes are distributed as Rubygems, and so can come from any source that Bundler supports. My hope is that this will lead to a decent ecosystem of themes being made available for the less design inclined to choose from.

Themes can provide any number of templates, although there will be a core set which will cover the majority of websites, if you’ve got something completely different, just create a new template for it.

 Mountable Applications

If your site needs something more then just static content rendered by a template then you can specify points in the URL tree that a different application should be mounted. That can be any Rack compatiable application (up to and including a Rails application), but Noumenon is designed to make it easy to subclass it’s core and continue to make use of your theme’s templates.

Once the backend interface is in place mountable applications will also be able to hook into that to provide a way to manage them.

I’d love to hear what people think of this. I’m planning to use it for smaller websites that clients ask me to build, so I’ll continue building this even if no one else wants to use it, but my long term aim is for this to replace Wordpress as the publishing application people want to use.

Yeah, I know. Think small ;)