10 years ago, almost to the day, I began developing a new CMS from scratch. It's finally live and of course it's open sourced on GitHub!

I've always enjoyed creating my own web sites, going as far back as 1993 or so. Shortly thereafter, I made my first dynamic web page using Perl, CGI.pm, and Microsoft Access 😆. A few years later I started hearing about "an improved Perl" called PHP, so I purchased a book and starting playing. I was hooked and around 1998 I decided to create my first content management system with PHP and MySQL -- an arrangement that would later be known as the LAMP stack.

I enjoyed my simple CMS for a few years but I started to run short on time and the web was evolving quickly. I needed a new CMS but didn't have time to create a new one from scratch. I decided to try a few of the emerging free ones at the time: Drupal, Mambo, Serendipity, etc. but I was never very happy with any of them. Then in 2006, Zend released an amazing PHP framework called (unimaginatively) the Zend Framework. Having a little more free time I decided to create a new CMS with the ZF. Very quickly I was able to build a new CMS using ZF and all the latest web technologies of the time, such as jQuery. However, I still felt like my CMS was missing something. 

Around the same time, I started hearing murmurs about a cool new product from Google called Google Reader. It was a new way to browse the web using RSS and ATOM feeds -- and it was awesome. Having the ability to bring in content from Google Reader into my CMS is I what I needed. So I redesigned my CMS to pull in data from Google Reader, called it Gatherer CMS, and released the code as open source to GitHub.

Of course, as with all good things at Google, Reader was shutdown in 2013. I quickly pivoted and used Google's other cool service at the time to bring in data, Google+. Around 2016, with rumors that Google+ wasn't long for this world, I wanted to create a new CMS. I had been playing with the new Zend Framework 3 but was really frustrated with its poor design and documentation. I heard good things about the Symfony framework and they had just released version 3.0 so I took the leap. It was a huge improvement over ZF and I started on what would eventually become Gatherer CMS v3.

As it goes, life got busy and I kept putting it off. New versions of Symfony or Bootstrap would come out and I'd have to start some big chunk of the project over from scratch. Finally with a little free time and a few new tools (yes, that includes AI), I heaved it over the finish line. It could still use a little more polish but that's the easy part. Enjoy!