The Technology behind the Art Experience project

This site is built on top of one fantastic open source Content Management System (CMS) for the Microsoft.Net platform: Cuyahoga (see the Cuyahoga project page).

At the difference of the other more ancient open source platform like DotNetNuke (DNN) or inexpensive CMS like Dozing Dogs, the Cuyahoga platform engine is really new (project started in 2004 - Thanks Martijn ) actually in version 1.0 and entirely written in C#.

What I like is the flexibility (module based approach), and the fact that the team has also incorporated other open source technology such as

• NHibernate, an Object Relational Mapping framework which is the equivalent of the famous Hibernate for Java
  
• Lucene.Net as the primary full-text indexing and searching engine also the equivalent of the Jakarta Lucene engine (java). By the way, the Lucene search engine is the most powerful indexing platform available in the open source community (Today, the project is hosted in the incubation phase at Apache foundation)
  
• FCKeditor, the best (for us) Web based HTML editor – 100% Javascript and multi platform compatible.

As Cuyahoga is a really new platform, not a lot of content module is available. As Art Experience is essentially dedicated to image and photography presentation, we have developed a specific “Image Gallery Management” module for the CMS.

The Gallery Management module includes:

• Creation of galleries and associated images independently of a specific Cuyahoga section
  
• Image list display with popup and rating system
  
• Gallery comments management (based on the native Article module of Cuyahoga)
  
• Image slide shows with random image selection or image fade in transition

Last missing aspect in Cuyahoga is the Meta tags management. Actually, the core doesn’t implement Meta tags. So…

As we wanted to have a rich-set of Meta tags for Search engine optimization (SEO), we have developed a complementary module “Meta Data Management” which enables the administrator or a user with enough right to control the set of Meta tags for each node of the site.

The Meata Data Management  module includes

• A complete list of both META http-equiv and META name with their definition and syntax. This list is maintained inside a separate XML configurations file and is easily customizable by the administrator
  
• A separated “defaults” Meta Tags files containing the default name and content for a web site
  
• The possibility for an external module to register dynamically new Meta tags during page generation

Complementary technology:

We want to thanks the open source community and especially:

	Dynamic Drive: they have really cool Javascript, all for free!!  We have used those from their Image Section for the fade-in effects and the really cool "in place" popup of an image
	MaxMind: they have an open source version of their nice geographical IP locater. We are using it to detect the country location of a registered user when he places a comment
	Yahoo UI Libray: for their tremendous Javascript library and more…
	Again most important is the CMS kernel

Dominique (aka dop)

Comments

• Very helpful synopsis and backgroung concise and informative (with links for further investigation)! Thank you!

  by Khalil - 10/17/2006 4:43:39 AM