My FeedBin plugin works fine for now, but it’s just a little toy compared to what I’m doing next. You might remember my post about GameLib, a CMS plugin for Wordpress. (if you want to check out a screenshot you can go here) It’s still a work in progress, but I have solved the problems with displaying the correct page with several kinds of URLs. This was a big breakthrough for me and I imagine that the rest of its development would be cake compared to this. I want this plugin to be fun to use, and it is just the start. GameLib is very specialized, for blogs in a certain niche, and it has not much use outside the gaming community. I want to turn it into something everyone can use, but I’ll explain that part later in this post.

Now I will go in more detail on GameLib than my last post. The plugin organizes information into three groups: games, platforms, and companies. Companies would be the publishers and developers that make and distribute the games, and platforms are the systems that the games belong to. Another game-specific feature I would want to add are a “coming soon” section, a calendar-like widget that shows release dates of upcoming dates. Normally I find calendars to be unnecessary to browse posts in blogs, but in the right context they make a lot of sense to have. Guest reviews might also be a feature but I’m not considering that at the moment.

As you can see, this is all specialized and will only try to promote it to owners of gaming blogs. It would be limiting to shoehorn this plugin for non-gaming blogs. But it will be the foundation for a more flexible system. I am going to turn it into a fully realized CMS that can truly turn Wordpress-powered sites into larger collections of information. For instance, what if you want to write general information about movies, countries or bands, but the Page Manager might prove too clumsy to handle dozens or hundreds of similar articles? You might also want to update a band’s concert schedule, or a TV show’s episode listing, but without needing to update the whole page. That would require another level of organization that would be too much for custom fields. With a full CMS, you wouldn’t need custom fields for every page or article since everything can be automatically cross-referenced.

Now, this is still a long ways off, but once I completed GameLib and get feedback from it I will be more ready to continue on building the next CMS. I want to restrain myself from saying that it will be “huge” in terms of functionality, because most people think of dozens of menus and admin sections that seem loosely connected together. Things should only be as complicated as much as you make them, which is how this CMS would work. For now, keep an eye out for GameLib, even if you’re not into video games. It will be the start of something even better!