The Story Of TheMaker

About 10 years ago, I found myself in the following situation...

I had just joined a certain non-profit organization that helps the young homeless people in Austin, TX and since I was the only staff member with programming experience, I was put in charge of creating and managing the organisations website.

Since HTML is actually a very simple language, that by the way has nothing to do with programming at all, I decided not to use any of the numerous WYSIWIG HTML editors. Instead I wrote the HTML by hand in a text editor. This approach was less expensive, as we didn't have to spend money on extra software. Hand writing the HTML gave me full control over the site contents as well as ensuring compliance to web standards.

For a while I was very happy just hacking away in my text editor. However, after a while the site got bigger. It was actually the sites navigation that got a lot bigger and with it the danger for "dead links" We decided to create versions of the site in other languages as well. I realised that I needed something to manage the site with; Something that would manage my links, images, navigation, footers and translations.

I knew that I would need a CMS (Content Management System). So I started to look around for one that would fit my needs, I soon realised that I wouldn't find one. All I found were overly complicated systems requiring SQL databases and all kinds of PHP setups that our web hosting did not offer. But most of all, they were all server side, this meant that I would have to edit the website through a browser which would require internet access. But what if I wanted to edit my website while sitting in a car, train or airplane and did not have internet access? I would have all this time to work on the site but no means of doing so.

None of those available tools would fit my needs. So I wrote my own. TheMaker was born.

Since then I have created and managed many websites using TheMaker. Some for myself, some for clients and some for that non-profit organisation. TheMaker is still my tool of choice, it works great with database driven sites as too.

You can create any website you can imagine with TheMaker. The possibilities are endless.

Well, this is my story and the story of TheMaker. It might be exactly what you are looking for...

Gerald.