I found a lot that I liked in Dave Winer’s manila project, but I didn’t have much control over the development of it.

##History

[[Frontier]] began as a scripting environment on the Macintosh platform. In fact, it preceded [[Apple]]’s own Applescript by several years.

After several years of languishing in the scripting market, and with some very frustrating interation with Apple, Dave Winer decided to stop development on Frontier and release it for free.

People started playing with it, and found that it’s object oriented database and scripting language could be used to good effect for holding and building websites (this is back around 1993 for those that are interested). So, development started up again, but the product remained free.

I started playing with [[Frontier]] back when version 4.2.3 came about (it’s now at version 7.1). It took me a while to grok it, but once I did, I fell in love. I was able to do things with my website that most of my friends could only dream of. And it had nothing to do with the look of the site. It had to do with how quickly I could add content and have things linked together in a reasonable way.

I ported the site to Frontier 5.0, and then something completely understandable but a little disappointing happened: Frontier went commercial. Or, I should say, it returned to being a commercial product.

##A Hobby

My website is basically a hobby. I update it often, modify the layout, etc. just because I have fun doing so. I couldn’t justify the cost of Frontier for something that’s not much more than a toy for me. I decided to stick with Frontier 5.0 (which is still free by the way), and hope that eventually there would be another free release of Frontier with some bugs fixed and some new features.

Enter [[Radio]].

Radio is essentially the same scripting/database/outlining environment that I was used to with one very important enhancement: It talked to the manila site engine (which runs inside a Frontier web server). And, it’s free!

So, I ported my website into Radio. I loved it.It was the same, only more.

##Manila

Also about this time, I started working as the Director of I.T. and my company, and decided to buy a copy of Frontier to explore the possibilities of Manila as a content management system for my work. It worked well, but it was a bit slow. And, unfortunately, it didn’t really take off.

But, it did get my brain working.

##MacOSX

Then, a miracle happened. Apple release [[MacOSX]], and the world changed forever. My Macintosh now runs UNIX natively! The entire open source world opened up to me. I immediately started playing with [[MySQL]] and [[PHP]] and after some aborted attempts to use some other (in my opinion) inferior to Manila content management systems, I decided to write a CMS that did all the things that I liked most about Manila, with some things that I wish it would do.