Jakob Külzer Ninja Coding Monkey goes Canada

Building a CMS using XML, XSLT, Ant and ImageMagick

Not so long ago a freelance client approached me with some updates for their website. The site has been growing organically since 2000 and therefore was a big mess. Several attempts to port the site to a CMS driven system failed largely because those CMS systems are usually to complex for our needs (Typo3) or not flexible enough (Joomla, Wordpress). So as I was faced with updates to all the updates including image updates which in turn needed thumbnails to be generated. The same day I stumbled randomly over the xsl:result-document function in XSLT 2.0 which allows you to transform a single XML file into several output files. That sparked an idea with me: why not use that to build a CMS system using XML technologies? I've toyed around with Cocoon a couple of years ago but that was not what I was looking for. So I looked for other technologies...

This post is a write-down of my experiences building a XML/XSLT driven simple CMS system. In it I will show you the required technologies, my approaches and my solutions to problems I've encountered. You'll need a solid understanding of XML at least, understanding of Ant and XSLT helps a lot, too.

This post contains tons of XML and I tried my best to format it in a readable way — in fact I've spent hours to get everything nicely on the screen.