RawCMS

New, Old, Real, Arc

RawCMS lived in five copies of itself: _new, arc, new, old, real. I started it in June 2005 and worked on it through September. The one I actually edited was real. This was version control by copying folders, which is why I've never complained about learning git.

RawCMS was my modular PHP content system, the third or fourth engine I'd written by then depending on how you count Gemini's versions. Admin, modules, templates, language packs, rich text editing, and an installer, since I wanted other people to be able to run it. The shared raw_config table and remoting layer went into the band sites I was building that same summer, so the client work paid for the framework and the framework made the client work faster.

I've ended up doing that a lot over the years: build something for a client, pull the engine out of it, give it a name, and use it on the next job.