Work is beginning on the world’s best ever, open-source CMS! Charl van Niekerk has had the idea for a while to write an open source, general purpose CMS that not only produces valid content by default, but ensures that all content written is valid. Some of the basic validation requirements for the system should include:

• Well formed, including properly encoded entities and proper nesting and closing of elements.
• Valid according to DOCTYPE.
• Valid character encodings. No windows-1252 characters in the range 0×80 to 0×9F for documents declared as ISO-8859-1, UTF-8 or any other character encoding – they are control characters. The default, and highly recommended character encoding should be UTF-8.

Basically, the system should not allow invalid content under any circumstances, including from reader comments. It should use a real validator, not a linter which are quite often misleading or totally incorrect.

These are just a few of the basic requirements that I would like to see. Anne van Kesteren has written a much more complete list of requirements for the perfect weblog system which we will be referencing a lot, but some of it may be overkill.

So, this project is just getting started and, AFAIK, will be run through Source Forge. If you have any questions, ideas about system requirements or want to get involved, you can contact either myself or Charl van Niekerk. It’s his project, I’m just helping out, but we want as many people who are willing and able to get involved. So let’s make this happen, and let’s build the best CMS ever!