RyeTEK CMS History

Having used Microsoft's ASP.NET 1.1 framework from late 2003 I realised that the technology was moving fast. It was now 2007, ASP.NET 2.0 had been out for well over a year, and was boasting a huge amount of new features. Another buzzword being bandied around was AJAX (Asychronous JavaScript And XML) and Microsoft had already released a (seperate) ASP.NET AJAX library. It was time to jump on the ASP.NET 2.0 + AJAX bandwagon and move on.

In late 2007 I bought the books SAMS ASP.NET 2.0 Unleashed by Stephen Walther and Wrox's ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming: Problem, Design, Solution by Marco Bellinaso. It was at this point that I needed a "project" to which to apply the knowledge that I was learning from the books. Marco's book specifically dealt with writing a content management system (CMS) and therefore, without really thinking about it too much at the time, I decided to do the same.

Rather than building on what Marco had already done I decided to write my own CMS from ground-up for two main reasons. The first reason is that I was very familiar with VB.NET (Visual Basic) but Marco had written all his code in C# (although in fairness someone did port Marco's C# code to VB.NET and released it on the Internet). I wanted to continue using VB and so choose that. The second reason was software licensing. I didn't want to be tied in to any licensing restrictions by using Marco's existing code.

During the remainder of 2007 and throughout the entire year of 2008 I got very little work done on RyeTEK CMS. This was mainly due to other commitments and personal projects that I undertook such as The Pickering 60s Festival website. I did however read through and understand most of the chapters of each of the books mentioned above.

My interest in writing a CMS was re-kindled in 2009 after a dicussion with a friend. He's on the Pickering 60s Festival committee and had found a few short comings with the administration of the Pickering 60s Festival website particulary with adding new pages. It just wasn't flexible enough. It was at this point that I decided it would be good to get RyeTEK CMS back on track.

Unforutnately by the time the Pickering 60s Festival web space hosting fee was due in August 2009 I did not have enough work done on RyeTEK CMS to reproduce the Pickering 60s Festival's current website. I therefore advised that they renew the hosting fee with their current hosting provider for a further year. This means that, as of February 2010, the Pickering 60s Fesitval website is still using some of my really old PHP code.

Going back to the beginning of 2009 one of the first things that I did to RyeTEK CMS was to change it so that it used the now available ASP.NET 3.5 framework. This framework had already been out for over a year and it's main feature for me was having the ASP.NET AJAX library integrated as part of the framework.

It's now February 2010 and RyeTEK CMS is finally here in a usable form!

I will periodically come back and update this history as the journey continues.