About Zaapt and Andy Chilton

Zaapt came about because at one stage of my working career I was working with a highly organised and data-centric site. We received lots of data from elsewhere, processed it and spat it out again. In fact, a lot of my working life has been like that (isn't that funny: data in, process, data out - sounds familiar).

But then I started developing my own sites. They all had data coming in but instead of it coming in by the ton, it was created by users, admininstrators, editors and me! I found that user generated data was something I liked more than machine generated data - that more personal feel to it. Someone's creation, their mind, their camera, their experience, their thoughts.

The more I did my own sites (photo albums, fantasy sport games, blogs, shared photos) and the more I helped users set up their own sites, the more I enjoyed it. The more sites I developed the more I craved for consistency, the less work I wanted to do and the more I wanted a CMS to take all my troubles away.

But there was no such CMS I wanted to use. And besides, even though my sites were not exactly the same, they weren't a million miles away from each other either and had the basics of what I wanted and in the technologies I wanted them in. When one specific site came along which would be bigger than all the others combined I knew this was the opportunity to write Zaapt and the site concurrently. It also meant that with it being released in under a month and a half, there would be real people using it immediately.

And so Zaapt was born. Birthday 2006-12-19.

Since then, there has been many hours of development put into it, extra content types and more on the way. It has expanded and with this site, Zaapt now has a life of it's own.

That's were we stand now. This might not ever be that big (I'm sure someone has said that before) but I'm sure there are a few people who wouldn't mind playing with it too.

License

As always, it's licensed under the same terms as Perl, which means you can use it as either the GPL or the Artistic license. If you do have patches, I'd be keen on taking a look for possible integration into the site.

Re-inventing the Wheel

You might say I'm re-inventing the wheel, but that can only happen if the wheel already exists. Instead, I'm a believer of In Defense of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome.

What I mean is, I use and will use Zaapt a lot in my future sites and therefore, I want to know everything about it. I'd rather do that since that can only help me and anyone I produce sites for. If anyone else finds Zaapt useful (and I hope they do), then I'd be over the moon.