Introducing Zotonic

Together with my colleagues and friends Tim and Marc, I have spent the past few months developing Zotonic: a CMS based on the functional programming language Erlang. Zotonic is an amazing product, benefiting from the concurrent nature of Erlang to perform at blazing speeds, typically 10-100 times faster than a "regular" cms built in PHP on Apache.

The data model of Zotonic is very generic and can be though of to use only 2 database tables: one to store documents, called resources, and one to create connections between these resources. Furthermore, resources are classified in a category tree, so you can develop functionality (like different page controllers and templates) based on which category a resource belongs to.

Speaking of the templating system: we decided to go for a language similar to Django's Template Language: ErlyDTL. This language has a clean syntax but is very powerful due to its template inheritance mechanism.

On November 13, 2009 we released Zotonic 0.1.0 to the public, but a 0.2 version is already in the making. Go to the website or join one of the mailing lists to stay in touch with the latest developments!

Links

• Zotonic website
• Download Zotonic @ google code
• Mailing lists: zotonic-users and zotonic-developers