devis and Open Source

A really great write-up on devis (where I work) and some of our recent work in Info World (InfoWorld: U.S. government seeks the open road: March 12, 2004: By Grant Gross and Ed Scannell: Application Development). The key tool is the application of which I am the project manager: EZ Reusable Objects (EZRO) which has been built over the last few years by a team of incredibly talented developers.

I run EZRO on my PowerBook G4 under MacOS X 10.3 (Panther) but it was developed to be run under Linux and, more recently, directly under Windows. I wish I could host it at Pair.com, my hosting provider, but I need to be able to run Zope and have access to Apache configs. I need to work out a solution for this. I want to be able to run my sister’s business site in it so she can manage her own content without having to know any HTML at all (it’s perfect for that kind of thing).

It’s a pretty neat tool. It lacks many of the bells and whistles of the higher-end content management tools but it’s core goal is to be a super-simple, very easy to use and manage tool for doing site content.

The most recent site to go live in this engine is our own site (devis.com) which I spent a very long week building out from the deisgners Photoshop master into a CSS-based skin (view the source, I did some sneaky things in there… it’s not, by any stretch, the best semantic markup, but at least there are no goddam tables in there! 🙂

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to lately. When I’m not railing against the Bush Administration.