I originally developed a nice little content management system called OCCCM for PHP and MySQL. It was quite functional, performed well (although it was never really tested under load), had a very capable permissions model, was easy-to-template and exceptionally easy-to-use. However, it didn't have a lot of features I wanted from my CMS (eg blogs, image galleries). Worse, as it had grown up in stages from a very basic page editing tool, the design of the thing made it quite difficult to extend. Nevertheless, it was used by (and is still used by) a handful of sites, though I switched most of my own sites to Drupal.

Now Drupal is great; it's very functional and has oodles of extensions. However, it's also hard work. Writing custom templates is comparatively difficult for the uninitiated, and many users find the tools for managing content and site structure to be quite challenging. The admin features are effective but quite obtuse. Other content management systems are great as well, but for one reason or another just don't suit me. So I'm delighted to announce that Ballaird is going to be redeveloping OCCCM! A completely new design has been developed, which honours the ease-of-use and simplicity of templating of the original OCCCM, while providing template designers with much more flexibility and control, users with more functionality, system administrators with better performance and scalability, and developers with a much more extensible platform.

Development of the new OCCCM is already under way, and you can check on news, status and progress at the OCCCM web site. As before, the new version will be GPL-licensed (probably under the "v2 or later" language).