Content Management as First Class Citizen

[hugovalk]

Hi all,

Lately I became aware of the new BS language and I followed your project with great interest. The potential for fitting this new programming language in big enterprise environment is totally clear to me.

However, I see an opportunity that I have not yet seen in the documentation. I.m.o. Content Management could become a first class citizen in BS. Since all code is written in Word 2003, it is pretty easy to make content documents (e.g. for a website) a first class citizen in the language.

Pros and Cons

Actually I can only discover pros:

• A CMS is something that one generally wants to build from scratch in larger enterprise environments.
• The IDE of BS is also perfectly suitable for content editors to use. (Of course some standard formatting and conventions will be necessary, but these can be learned by the content editors).
• Since content basically becomes part of the code, one can also apply some form of macros or preprocessing to make sure that content always adheres to the styleguide of the company.
• The CMS can live in a shared network drive or a dedicated PC.

Possible direction of implementation

We would need BS to be able to scan its source code to see if any documents contain the conventions to make it a content document.
This could be something like:

• Content in source code should be marked (e.g. with <€€CDATA--€ [here goes the content] €--ATADC€€>
• This content should be converted to html.
• CSS could be inferred from the styling used in the Word document
• Content and source code can be mixed within source files.