I've taken some time away from the blogosphere, as well as places like Facebook, Twitter, etc, 'cause, in addition to needing some time away from 'net activities, I've been performing an overhaul of the mochaCMS backend code, as well as an overhaul of the Control Panel UI and the development of a theming engine.

That's right, mocha will, indeed, have a theming engine, by which end users will be able to upload and apply themes (templates, designs, whatever) as tar packages from within the control panel. Creating themes will be fairly easy- all a front end geek needs to create a theme is the normal HTML, CSS, javascript (if they want dynamic stuff), and the basic file heirarchy architecture for themes (header, footer, sidebar files, styles and image directories, etc). All pretty basic stuff. The goal here is to make it easy, in order to encourage third-party development. Of course, even more cool stuff can be done if the coder/designer/engineer has a basic understanding of JSTL and Expression Language! The system itself makes extensive use of JSTL and EL.

As for the backend stuff, I've cut roughly 20% of the code, by making more objects reuseable and concatenating several functions. This will mean fewer server-side resources and an even faster application. In addition, it will also reduce needed database resources. This should also make developing modules easier, by requiring less code, as developers can plug into capabilities already there.

Also on the to-do list is the stock mocha theme. Once that's all done, the project site will need building, too, but will likely reflect the stock theme. Is an engineer's work ever done?!

So, if in the near future, you pay a visit and the site is down, it'll be because I'm rolling out the new, improved version of mochaCMS, as well as a few design tweaks I'm making to my site.