Pie 0.5

Pie is a lightweight content management system for Web-sharing documents, files, and arbitrary pieces of information.
Pie is just another web-based content composition and management environment using the idea of collaborate editing and sharing, an idea that has been taken to great extends lately by a crusade called Wiki.
Although so-called content management systems existed long before, employing both, proprietary as well as standardized means, the Wiki mythos pushed this effort even farther.
As with XML, another internet hype, and one that is still based many illusions upon (careless marketing strategists and clueless mortals have conventionalized XML to be one of those black magic three-letter acronyms that, if inhaled properly, is able to cook coffee, change your kids nappies and, all things considered, makes you a better human being once youve accepted it and freely offer it your untainted soul), Wikis more and more come to the publics attention and you clearly classify yourself as an outsider if you do not embrace the new technologys blessing.
A projects or ideas popularity shares its symptoms with economic growth: once it is unleashed upon the populace, grapping and holding their and all bystanders attention, it can not be stopped anymore until, of course, the climax is reached and everyone turns away, bored to death.
Nevertheless, Pie is another attempt to bore people willing to pay attention, offering its services freely and obendiently to those who are willing to accept them.
Pie has been designed to be tasty and can be served with a variety of ingredients. Basically, it serves you by gladly feeding upon your mental output, this being mostly text, but also graphics, music, programs and other intellectual property.
Before you build up your illusions right away, at the very start, it should be mentioned that Pie is unable to cook coffee. This fact cannot be stressed and overemphasized enough. Being a content management system, Pie does lots of things for you, but it certainly cant cook coffee.
If this was one of your basic requirements, you may cut off here, right now, and go for a secretary instead. (Hopefully, you didnt take this barking of your shin too seriously. Yet, it might have saved you a lot of time, if properly prepared coffee really was what you were looking for.)
Imagine, just for a moment, that youd like to collect your thoughts, on any conceivable matter. You could handle this the conventional way by writing them down in your diary. Still, you are a modern person, always having preferred to employ technology whereever you can.
Consequently, you foreclosed, of course, to make use or your PCs text processing features, thus being able to edit, cut and paste, and move around and modify your text in whatever manner and as often as you like.
Let us take this scenario one step farther: you not only want to be able to manage your thoughts at home or at work, but virtually everywhere and anytime. Sure, you can use a laptop for this purpose. However, being a social being, you want others to participate and take in (or even contribute to) your ideas - again, anytime and everywhere, as long as the participants have access to moderate 20s century technology.
You may send your data and files back and forth, using e-mail, or you could even rely on more sophisicated technology, like CVS, or you could make use of your proprietary publishing softwares distributed auto-update feature to spread your latest thoughts to remote clients, the participants, anywhere in the Net. Alternatively, you might rely on one of the Nets most accepted means: the Web.
Doing so, not only enables you to refrain from ugly, expensive, proprietary software, but also connects you, and those with whom you intend to share your intellectual propery, using a simple, standardized means.
Main features:
- Quick page processing and short run-time latency
- Low system requirements (both, in regard of the running servers performance as well as the complexity of the installed software base)
- Independent of ODBC, SQL and other database systems, both, session-based and file-based
- Multi-user support
- Page locking
- Browsable and revertable page versioning
- Local link/referer verification
- Optional (semi-)automatic page expiration
- Customizable PCRE-patterns for pages and files
- A rather extensive user manual
- Localized user interface
- Optional directory hashing to handle large amounts of files
- Small and simple code library
- Easily adaptable and extendable to personal needs
- Weighs less than 200 blocks (i. e. 100 KB), including online documentation
- Supports many common HTML directives, including tables
- XHTML 1.0 clean output
- Peachy
Enhancements:
- The code library has been completely rewritten, focusing on extendability and abstraction.
- All low-level functions have been implemented as OO classes.
- Both pages and files support an arbitrary number of versions, limited only by the capacity of the underlying file system.
- Usability has been improved.
- Most operations are selectable from drop-down menus via mouse clicks or Editing Mode.
- Editing has been fine-tuned.
- Text can be marked and, by clicking a button, applied various markup properties.