Is that a Kubla on your shoulder?

A little project named “Kubla” keeps coming up in mozilla.com meetings, and has sparked some discussions about policy, announcing projects, and general openness. I think what caused the debate to center around this particular project was my mentioning that Kubla had “met it’s first milestone on time.” I think people interpreted this as meaning that the project was pretty far along – in reality, the project is a few weeks old, and the first milestone was setting up a framework and making some decisions about where we are going.

So, since Kubla has achieved so much fame already, an introduction is in order: Kubla is a project to manage content on mozilla.com (a CMS). Since our rewrite of mozilla.com to support multiple languages we’ve been without an easy way for everyone to update the content. The goal for this project is to have all the content on mozilla.com easily accessible and editable by those who need to make updates. The project will focus on simplicity and usability so the barrier of entry is low enough that a casual volunteer can login and help with translations.

We’ve already had some preliminary meetings about what we want in a CMS. I think our requirements are pretty straight forward at this point (which falls nicely into my hope for simplicity). It also means that I didn’t want to build on an existing CMS, because I thought our specific needs were uncommon enough that they wouldn’t be served by a smaller CMS, and a large application would conflict with my goal for simplicity. Since quite a few people have asked me for details on this, I’ve added some additional thoughts to the bottom of the requirements page. Due to the upsurge in discussion, I’m getting some good suggestions for further products to look at before we commit to writing our own – updates will follow I’m sure.

At this point, there is no preview or usable site since most of the project still exists on paper, however, the wiki holds the core information and will be kept up to date as the project progresses. As always, the current code is available if you want to have a look.

Feel free to comment, ask questions, or volunteer. 🙂 I’m also available via email or IRC.

4 responses

  1. morgamic wrote on :

    Could you please post this somewhere public?

  2. michael schurter wrote on :

    Aw… PHP? Don’t you know ruby and python are the future? 😉 (ducks)

  3. fwenzel wrote on :

    Wil, I love this post’s headline 🙂

  4. asai wrote on :

    it is very nice