CMS question

[Gruzin]

Hi guys,
I decided to write my own CMS using php/mysql. Don't know how to start, any ideas will be very usefull.

Thanks,
George

[redbullmarky]

can you try and be a little more detailed? what stage are you at now?

i personally like to start with a wishlist of sorts. if you've got a fair bit of experience with CMS's, then you'll know what you like/dislike about others both from a features and a coding/structure point of view, and which ones you feel comfortable with and why.
try and decide what parts of your CMS are gonna be part of its 'Core', and which parts are better classed as 'addins'. From there, I generally find the coding standards, directory structure and some skeleton files normally helps me visualise how everything is going to fit together. how it goes from there depends on what you're specifically after.

cheers
Mark

[obsidian]

One other question of interest to add to redbull's list of clarifications is an overarching one: what is your CMS going to do? Are you going to generate full pages, or are you simply wanting a system to update content within a rigid structure that is already in place?

[Gruzin]

[quote author=obsidian link=topic=113458.msg461076#msg461076 date=1162388269]
One other question of interest to add to redbull's list of clarifications is an overarching one: what is your CMS going to do? Are you going to generate full pages, or are you simply wanting a system to update content within a rigid structure that is already in place?
[/quote]

That's why I need you ideas: I don't know what my CMS is going to do. so please tell me - What good (fully functional) CMS should be doing?

Thank you very much for your answer,
george

[obsidian]

Well, there are several approaches to this. What is your website going to do? Each CMS that is built should be built for a specific purpose. If you don't have a goal in mind of something to accomplish, the effort is pretty much wasted. For instance, I have written one CMS to handle a periodical site. This CMS simply allows article creation, image uploading and issue generation. It [b]appears[/b] to create new pages with each issue, but in reality, the entire site is controlled by a very rigid 8 page layout. Everything else is simply handled by the database. So, my CMS had to do absolutely no file management (apart from the image uploads, of course).

On the other hand, I have done a CMS for another site that required the owner to be able to expand his site by a page when he wanted to. In this case, he actually can generate a new physical page on his server that defaults to the site template, and he can then fill in content. Each of these is completely different from a third I had to write for an eCommerce application here at work.

What I'm getting at is that you really need to have a goal in mind. I don't necessarily need to know what [i]features[/i] your CMS will have... we can help you with that. But, we do need to get a feel for the overall goal of what you want to be able to accomplish.

Hope this helps get you a little more concrete direction.

[Gruzin]

OK, I undestand. My goal doing this is the following: I work for web-design studio, so they want some kind of an "universal" CMS, which they can use for building web-sites. This means: Content management, image uploading, menu management and etc. This is basiclly what they want me to do, so if you guys have any idea, how "universal" CMS should look like, please let me know  ;)

Thanks to everyone!
George

[redbullmarky]

have you looked at ones already on the market? not necessarily to use (unless that's an option) but at least to get an idea of what to include. that's gonna be better homework than having a bunch of strangers "guessing"  ;)

http://www.drupal.org - Drupal
http://www.joomla.org - Joomla
http://source.mambo-foundation.org - Mambo
http://phpnuke.org - phpNuke

the list goes on, but i guess these are some of the more popular ones for PHP

[Gruzin]

redbullmarky, thanks freind, really interesting information for me  :)

[ober]

The thing I hate about most CMS is the fact that they're all geared toward blogs.  Most of the CMS out there don't provide utilities for managing shopping carts, updating community calendars, building full content pages, or managing users.

I'm currently working on my own that will handle all that and more.  I plan to include client billing, stats, style management, and more.  My goal would be to have someone pretty much be able to build a site using my CMS and a config file.

[Skatecrazy1]

I've never coded an entire one before, but what I can tell you is modularize everything, so that you can add things later.  You'll always regret it if you can't add things on afterwards.

[Gruzin]

OK guys, think I understand how to start. The thing is that I never used CMS for building entire web-site, so I have to make a program which will be able to do that. Skatecrazy1, you are right, I have to [color=green]modularize everything [/color], but I am not quit sure how to do that, any suggestions will be very usefull.

Thank you all!
George

[redbullmarky]

Hi again
You'll have to forgive me for being a little rude here, but I would say that your best bet would not be to attempt to make your own just yet. Some of the fundamental issues you need to know (modularising, organising, features, etc) isn't something easily learnt overnight, but something that comes with time and practice.
Personally, if I was in your shoes, I'd compromise - I'd be downloading a copy of Drupal. It's a little scary at first, but absolutely rammed with features to build sites of all sorts - have a look at their site and look at some of the sites built using it and you'll get the idea that it's not just for "home users", but large sites too. On the other hand, I'd be delving right into the Drupal code and structure, making sure I knew how it was working, etc. This way, I'm able to knock up a full site using a CMS whilst learning how to organise/structure/code one at the same time. Compromise. If the size of the code and the practices used in these fully fledged CMS's doesnt confuse or scare you off somewhat, then maybe you're ready to try, if that's what you wish to do.

In terms of modularising, this can be described in many ways, but in this case, it's about making your code expandable. There's no use having a CMS that can only do one type of thing, which is where I agree a little with ober's sentiment that many are geared towards blogs. One look at the code of pretty much ANY fully featured CMS is that there is more code than you can throw a stick at, doing all sorts of things. Without any structure, thought and planning before hand, this could get extremely messy and hard to maintain as it grows. OOP, and employing the Model/View/Controller (MVC) design pattern will help you out tonnes (look at the 'Resources' tab at the top of the [u][url=http://www.phpfreaks.com/forums/index.php/board,58.0.html]Application Design[/url][/u] forum).

I'd only personally recommend someone built a full CMS for two reasons: 1) to learn/fun 2) need something specific. in the latter's case, there are so many plugins and mods for many of the CMS's I listed that it's probably gonna be something out of this world if you can't find a plugin for it.

hope that helps
Cheers
Mark

[Gruzin]

Mark, thank you very much. I already decided to download Drupal  :) you are right, I have to know how all this stuff works, so I have to see it in action...

Thanks for your help guys,
George