Attendees: several were present, but most of the yapping was done by (alphabetically):
Dave Bauer
Ben Bytheway
Dave Hill
Walter McGinnis
Michael Steigman
Alfred Werner
Jun Yamog

I'll make this a big picture summary, and leave the detailed minutes to the log. This is obviously my take on the state of things, feel free to comment:

CMS Project Status:

• bcms is a good basic CR tcl API
• bcms-ui-base should be a good first UI version, and is being developed and debugged rapidly.
• webDAV support (actually, a general webDAV-CR interface) is coming along rapidly. (much discussion of this occurred, and many kudos given to DaveB, as it's rather cool, and we're all happy someone else dug in and wrote it)
• several of us have clients that need some kind of CMS over the next 6-12 weeks, so things are actually going to get done.

CMS Project Approach:

• the UI and many specific features of a good CMS are very client-specific
• thus, our first approach will be to build a set of tools (API and pages) that can be combined and customized, rather than an all-encompassing package
• after we get those tools built and playing nice together, we can focus on what needs to be done to make it releasable.

Tech/Design Issues Discussed:

• webDAV and how cool it was
• compound objects: a CMS object (likely a page) that includes several other CMS objects. IMages are the most common, but could be anything. those items need to stay related to the main object during all actions. Two approaches:
  • using cr_rels to relate
  • setting up some kind of container, like a special "resources" folder, that was attached to that object and not manipulatable separately
• using the compounds could be done with varying levels of user freedom:
  • straight URL linking to a "resources" folder (works nice w/ webdav)
  • magic tags, something like <cms_include>
  • set templates with holes for fillilng in
• UI feature of preview templating, in which users could choose from a list of content templates and see thumbnails
  
  also mentioned in passing:
• page snippets (integrating tcl into the CMS, to allow functional includes)
• categorization: "look at timo's"
• CMS serving root pages -- integration with site nodes. DaveB said it was coming along. This was covered heavily in a November thread.
• workflow -- Jun said he was planning on integrating w/ Lars workflow

Following up on the cms-future feature list, it seems that we addressed a lot of the points, and left the following as lower priority for later: keywords, indexing, ll8n

Project Future:

the next set of things to develop are largely determined by our clients. Thus, the upcoming action items are:

• webDAV -- daveb
• bcms-ui-base, then workflow -- jun
• compound objects, and possibly page snippets - walter & dave
• preview templating - Alfred

We will all report back on these to the forum, and could realistically hope to integrate them, in good shape, at or around the bug bash.