Content Management Grail Quest or "The internet is for porn!"

I got online for the first time in the latter half of 1993. It took about two weeks for me and my little Unix shell account to discover Usenet. It took about two days beyond that for me to discover the alt.binaries.* hierarchy. Being a good geek, I maintained careful backups of an awful lot of what we shall euphemistically refer to as "media" for the purposes of this discussion. (For those of you who are over 18, feel free to copy the text of this entry, run a find and replace and substitute "porn" for "media".)

We're talking 12 years of history here folks. I've finally decided to see about putting it all together in some sort of sense-making format.. the question is: What tool to use?

About 5 or 6 years ago, I wrote a FileMaker database called "Porn Commander" which was, in fact, pretty damn slick. However, several versions of OS X, revisions to the AppleScript hooks in various programs and a bunch of generally irritating things like having a life that does not necessarily require me to be sitting in front of a computer all day writing databases in order to keep from becoming a raving lunatic. At the time i was also trading the porn that I was pulling down on my fat pipe for software that I needed to do a lot of contract work.

At any rate, I have rather a lot of media to be stored in a manner that facilitates sharing the collection with a select few others, should they desire, and generally leaving me with a sense of it having done something aside from gather virtual dust.

Here's the rough score:

Now they are all nicely sorted and categorized into a rather tightly organized hierarchical system. I also have that blasted Porn Commander database which has a lot of information on various bits of it, and was largely current until about 18 months ago. And I mean a LOT of info. Everything from physical specs on the models to the content of a particular series. Details on over a thousand models. Wardrobe. Activity. Hell when i realized that I had an awful lot of porn featuring gals in front of computers, I added a checkbox field specifically for that. I love a naked woman in front of a smoking hot Mac.

Feature wise, PC is a thing of beauty, although it was leaning heavily toward bloat near the end. But it had a lot of features that i think were borderline indispensable. Searching with it was a dream. Want to see a slide show of redheads between weight-proportional-to-height and slightly chubby, with proportionally small breasts, and genital piercings, but no tattoos? If there were any in the system, you could find them in a few clicks and menu selections.

I'd like to be able to preserve as much of that information as possible in whatever product I go to for media management. I hate to see all that effort go to waste.

I'm not sure that a simple gallery package will do what I need it to, and I really don't have the time to develop a web-app from the ground up for this. So something that is pretty readily customizable would be great.

So, I've come up with a list of things that I'd like to see in the system. Here they are:

• Should with play nice with or replace Movable Type. I like MT, and would rather not have a system that duplicates its functionality unnecessarily. But I'd be willing to trade out MT if the system had a decent blogging tool.
• MUST! run on Mac OS X.
• I would like to maintain the files in their current organized directory scheme. If i can get away with sym-linking the directories, so much the better- it will increase transportability down the line anyhow.
• Files should not, under any circumstances, be renamed.
• if it's a static page system, the pages should be easily regenerated for updates. Updates will tend to be pretty massive.
• Deep search-ability. Really deep. I want to be able to search by various categories, and i'd like a degree of control over how the results are presented- If I'm searching for models named "Jen", I'd like to see a single result for each Model, not a result for each series they appear in or what all. PC was very designed specifically for this sort of thing.
• Custom reporting, with minimal effort- something less fucked up than, say, Crystal Reports.
• Ideally, it should allow for a fully relational backend. perhaps even something that will encourage me to rebuild PornCommander and use that as a primary data-entry system, and then push the records through to the web-db.

That about covers the main points. I'm sure that i'll think of more later, but that covers the main points.

And yeah, I am a fucking pervert. So?