WebGUI: Kickstarter for a Modern Perl CMS

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UPDATE: The Kickstarter project reached its funding goal! Codename for Version 8 will be Allium Cepa. There is a project page on GitHub.

Scott Walters' 2014 Kickstarter, "Create Perl Competition to the PHP Content Management System" is somewhat open ended as to what this Perl-based CMS would be, but likely it will be based on the GPL'd WebGUI system created by Plain Black Corp. According to Scott's writeup,

…Version 7 is still being maintained, but 8 was a massive modernization effort that reworked core to use Moose, Plack, Try::Tiny, and cleaned things up.

Thanks to fantastic test suite coverage, the API and core of 8 work well, but the rewritten admin needs attention. Also, WebGUI has traditionally targeted large companies, so the difficult install process was not a major liability. To compete, installation has to be dead simple. The themes are not adequately modern (which is to say they look a little outdated).

I plan to get wG8 out of alpha, move it to a community development model, finish the installer I created for it and OSX support, and work with designers to create a modernized theme.

The installation script is currently Curses based, eliminating the web hole even in the first steps. A Docker install may also be included.

Why?

…wG is one of the most impressive and mature things ever created in Perl, and the community often raves to me about how much better they like it than competing systems.

− scrottie in the WebGUI Forums

More from scrottie (July, 2014): Perl Needs a User Friendly CMS [blogs.perl.org]

Background

From the Abstract, "Programming WebGUI: WebGUI 8 as a Web App Framework" by Scott Walters, (October 2011)

the WebGUI content management system.

Building apps on top of CMSes has become trendy in the Python and PHP camps, and for good reason: CMSes provide the primitives to build the most common types of Web applications, they're easy to interface with, and the idea of a tree of editable objects translates well to interactive Web sites.

WebGUI ships with a pile of ready to use pieces of logic (called "assets", implementing things such as shopping carts and Wikis) for laypersons to build a site out of, but it's also a fantastically programmer friendly framework for building more of these assets in.

WebGUI 8 is the upcoming iteration, sporting a new Plack interface, Moose attribute based asset definition, and countless modernizations and improvements. WebGUI handles the tedious work of data persistence, permissions, generating edit forms, pagination, and more.

See Also