Three Times Daily » php http://3td.heimerman.org What do YOU do Three Times Daily? Wed, 11 Aug 2010 03:23:45 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.5 Finding the right CMS http://3td.heimerman.org/2006/10/13/finding-the-right-cms/ http://3td.heimerman.org/2006/10/13/finding-the-right-cms/#comments Fri, 13 Oct 2006 18:29:31 +0000 Eric http://northern-designs.com/ThreeTimesDaily.com/2006/10/13/finding-the-right-cms/ I posted a couple weeks ago about Joomla.  Since I have now used Joomla on a couple sites, I’ve made a small wish-list of features that are missing from that particular CMS.  One of the most obvious ones is a granular permissions system.  I was eagerly awaiting the release of version 1.5 which just went beta yesterday.  However, the granular permissions which I thought might be there, did not appear to be.

So I’m on a mission to find the perfect CMS that can do everything.  It has to be free open source, php and mysql based, easy to set up a template, should have granular permissions.  Of course I want as many extras as possible.  Someone had pointed me toward something called “Harmony”, but after scouring Google, I cannot find any information about any CMS called “Harmony”.  Well, there was this, but I’m pretty sure that’s not it.

If you’re in the market for a CMS, I definitely recommend CMSMatrix.  They have categorized hundreds of free and commercial CMS packages, and there are a ton of search options.  My short list is Drupal, Sitellite, and Typo3.  I’ll be evaluating these three in the coming weeks and I’ll report back here.

]]> http://3td.heimerman.org/2006/10/13/finding-the-right-cms/feed/ 1 CMS for web development http://3td.heimerman.org/2006/09/20/cms-for-web-development/ http://3td.heimerman.org/2006/09/20/cms-for-web-development/#comments Wed, 20 Sep 2006 14:32:29 +0000 Eric http://northern-designs.com/ThreeTimesDaily.com/2006/09/20/cms-for-web-development/ For the web developers out there: Do you regularly use a CMS framework in your projects?

First a little background about me
I’ve been developing websites seriously for about 6 years. I’m self-taught and have no formal training. I started out by learning HTML and table layouts — no CSS, no <DIV>’s, etc.

Pretty soon I began hearing some talk about server-side scripting and became interested in JSP. I had a short period of formal “C” training in my past, so I caught on to the Java syntax and language structure very quickly. However, for most of my clients, JSP was not a practical solution.

I started to notice that something called “PHP” was included in most hosting plans, and after some investigation discovered that it was a “lightweight” server-side scripting engine without all the overhead and server configuration required for JSP. So I dove right in and before long abandoned JSP entirely.

Then about a year ago I finally discovered the wonders of CSS and table-less layouts. What a liberation!

So up until about a month ago, my design process has been as follows:

  1. design page layout using graphical design software.
  2. convert prototype image to valid HTML using CSS for layout.
  3. “PHP-ize” the layout so that the same HTML “template” can be applied to all pages of the site.
  4. develop some kind of back-end application to allow the client to manipulate site content.

The Present
That step 4 has always been a doosy for me. Every client is different and has different requirements. Unfortunately, it seemed that every project involved re-inventing the wheel to some degree. But basically, they all just want some sort of easy method to update and add content.

With a recent project, I decided to try something called Joomla, because the site itself was more or less news-centered and I thought it would be a good fit. I had tried phpNuke and phpBB in the past, but the template designs were so complex that I soon gave up. My first experience with Joomla was liberating. The template design was stupidly simple – just a single index.php file and a stylesheet. The site went up so fast, and porting content from their old site to the new “Joomla-enabled” site was so easy. I threw together a “Content Management and Administration” document for the client, and away they go.

The Future
So I start to think: what’s the drawback of this method of development? It seems like the CMS programs today have all of the flexibility to be able to deal with any kind of customization that might be required. All it takes is sometimes digging into the PHP code and making tweaks here or there. I suppose the overhead is a bit higher, as all of the content is stored in a database and response time is visibly slower at times and for some tasks (mileage may vary, depending on host). But the time and effort this saved me in designing the site, and the convenience of the client being able to make changes effortlessly more than makes up for it in my opinion.

Another benefit of this approach is that Step 3 virtually goes away as well. In the past I had to build back-end processors for building the pages and laying out the dynamic content, but all of that is included in the CMS. So the PHP-izing consists of simply plugging the CMS hooks into your template where you want the dynamic content to go. Piece of cake!

I think I’ve found my new best friend. ;)

Discussion
If you use a CMS regularly, which one? What drawbacks to you see to this approach?

]]> http://3td.heimerman.org/2006/09/20/cms-for-web-development/feed/ 2