May I point out that other frameworks like Symfony has an automated CMS system, not that I’m applauding their approach, still they have no problem telling people we are a framework.
Although, I did spot a community CMS in the CakePHP community that looks very cool, that’s all I’m asking a similar push from this community.
Nothing against Wordpress, and we are not asking to reinvent the wheel, after all CI is all about ease of development, but a good CMS based on CI can show a lot of developers what not to do on any development.
So come up with a doc.google that outlines the major functionality that you would like to see. That is the first step to any project, other than procrastinating of course.
With a cms you probably are going to use some sort of authentication and there are a few libraries for CI or would it be authentication library independent or will it have an own authentication?
People that already use one of the libraries should be able to keep using it if they add the cms so i think you would have to create some sort of authentication driver which has to include the existing libraries and where other authentication libraries could be added easy.
I think a core cms can be done fast but it should be easy to extend. I don’t think a full cms will not appeal to the CI developers.
That are two things i think would make a community cms popular.
I am looking for a flexible CMS for a website I am working on. I have built a website using WordPress and it is a very good technology, however it can be awkward adding custom functionality to it. I have been looking at alternatives such as Expression Engine. Can anyone answer a few questions? Like CI can you add your own custom classes? Can you create your own content types? I will download it now and have a play, any help would be greatly appreciated!
I am not able to understand the point of this discussion. CI helps you to make things easy and fast and if thats not all now people expect a CMS made with it. Come on guys !!! lets be realistic. A community CMS would surely help but after all everyone needs a CMS which is upto their needs. Let me give you an example. I am a sole developer of one of the oldest and fastest growing gaming website. I had a CMS made without any Framework which use to generate static HTML pages without any PHP code running in the frontend. Over the period of time we understood the shortcoming of such structure and we felt the need to rewrite for the frontend to work dynamically as well maintaining the URLs already done for SEO. I found Rails and its just fantastic ( to let you know I am doing a project in it)and started searching for something similar in PHP since at that point I was short of time to learn something new. I found CakePHP which I felt was equally cool but it took me a day to get started with it. It is just too complicated for someone new to frameworks. The search went on and I landed here at CI. I googled for comparisons and found that CI has less footprints and started developing in it. The user guide is cool so it took me 4 days to rewrite the complete site with CI which took me 3 - 4 week when i did the last CMS.
The moral of the story : When its so easy to develop with CI why do you expect something readymade.
I hope I did not hurt anyone’s sentiments here. Well the other news is I have started working on IgnitedCMS which will be an open source CMS for media based sites including videos, Pictures, Games Etc. Any suggestions, help and advice is welcomed.
It takes years to become good at PHP, CI is best used by people who already know PHP well, have been using it for a long time. With RoR it can do a couple things easily so you think its the greatest thing since sliced bread, but in reality it is not.
No matter how good a framework is, you need the learn the language and become a professional at it. Ruby sucks. I recommend becoming an expert at PHP, Python and some Perl.
Even the best CMS or framework can’t be the right tool 100% of the time. It can only provide general tools that an expert programmer customizes to work for the site. CI already provides a good set of tools for people to start working with.
In reality many of the tools (wiki, forums, user admin, photo galleries) that would make a CMS good have already been written by EllisLabs and are sold as ExpressionEngine. And such a project would never be officially supported by this website because it would be a direct competition for their main product. Which means that we would never see the CMS make it into the core SVN, it would have to exist outside codeigniter.com.
I would like to see Ellis Open Source EE and move into the business of selling support, also charging developers a yearly fee to be an authorized EE representative.
Elliot Haughin started a project earlier on CiForge called CodeIgnition CMS. The url is here.
Felice Ostuni (felix from the Rapyd project) is working on a CMS based on Rapyd.
The Modular Separation extensions provide a module like file system similar to Postnuke modules or Joomla components. Adding support to these extensions to add separate directories for storing blocks and templates is fairly easy (four lines of code). Modular Separation and Coolfactor’s proposed View library work well together to handle module views, block views (partials), and templates. Modular Separation modules can also call methods in other modules or other controllers within the same module. The combination of Modular Separation and the proposed View library would make a good set of extensions for building a CMS. Individual developers could build separate modules independently if someone wanted to organize a group to build a CMS.
However, most applications need a basic foundation of modules to handle routine operations such as email, user authentication, user authorization, internationalization, etc. A basic set of modules of this nature could be reused for many applications other than a CMS.
Yes but we don’t need CMS function that calls a CI function that calls the PHP mail() function. It should be coded so it makes sense and is fast!
I don’t know how far along Elliot’s project is. Also I am not so sure why people really need a CMS in the first place. CI already has the tools to build a site with. Isn’t making a CMS out of it a mute point? I mean I guess for the times when your not getting paid to make a site, and you don’t really give a crap, it might be nice.
I am wondering what are the stated project goals. How is going to be better than the current champion, Drupal?
Hi,
I still do not see any reason why a person needs a CMS when CI gives you the flexibility to make one fast and easy. Before starting to work on the CMS I made using CI. I had never worked on it. I remember David ( the creator or ROR) say that the best way to learn something is to start working on a live project using it and then you know where it lacks and what power it gives you. I found some shortcomings in CI but I still feel that those are just the way the CI developers think. Thats the reason i said that a CMS will depend on individual needs. ‘llbbl’ You have a real bad perception about ROR. I have been working with PHP for about 5 years now and it just took me 2 days to get used to Rails as Ruby is a fun language to learn and implement. I am already working on a project and would love to do some more in Ruby if the client gives the flexibility to choose the platform to develop and do not insist on PHP / MYSQL. And for your info ROR does not just give you few things which are cool. Its every thing in ROR thats cool. I got forums saying ROR is slow since it converts the tables in the database into objects and properties. But the project I am working on gives me blazing results. Faster than PHP 4 and slightly faster than PHP 5 without any caching both PHP. I know if I use any caching system. PHP would win hands on. Am also started to see DJANGO a lot these days as that looks a cool thing.
You are not forced to use any cms that is build on CI if you don’t want to. I’m not sure why this discussion gets so heated.
A lot of people want to give the possibility to their clients to make and adjust their own pages. And it looks like there is a bunch of people that discover php through CI so if there is (barebone) cms they can add to CI where they can play with maybe more people will be attracted to CI.
Instead of the 10 minute blog tutorial you could have the 2 minute cms tutorial for blogs and other user driven sites by the people who maintain the cms of course.
I think having applications/components build on CI is not a shame. I’m currently are making a human to sql function, will people use it? I don’t know but looks like a fun thing to do and if people use it all the better.
I would like some information pertaining to CMS, i have made most of the backend, but to make the frontend i am having trouble, as i need to make it customizable and able to use template. Can someone direct me in how i would impliment the front end. I originally created a controller caller front and made it load view called front. There is also a model which processes all database actions.
Hi,
You are very correct XWERO about the need of community CMS on top of CI. Let hope something good come out in ignitedCMS. I might need some suggestions and lots of help in starting this project and getting it to work.
Well as far as EASYLANCER is concerned. I have around 6 sites running on CI right now out of which there are couple of high traffic sites and I do not use views. Instead what I do is use the parser library to parse templates but just with a little difference. I modified the parser library to use variables instead of views. So I directly pull templates from the DB and parse it with appropriate data and output them to the browser. I use eaccelerator which makes the performance quite good. I think this is a way you can do but i do not know weather this is a best way or not. I have a site with around 75K uniques and some 160K page views running on CI and it works gr8. So i can suggest this.
I don’t know how far along Elliot’s project is. Also I am not so sure why people really need a CMS in the first place. CI already has the tools to build a site with. Isn’t making a CMS out of it a mute point? I mean I guess for the times when your not getting paid to make a site, and you don’t really give a crap, it might be nice.
I am wondering what are the stated project goals. How is going to be better than the current champion, Drupal?
The thread author wants to build a CMS based on CI. Most of us know this is possible. However, a CMS is a Content Management System. Most CMS applications (including Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, Postnuke, Xaraya, etc.) are actually built on top of a portal-like framework. The portal itself should be thought of as a foundation for building applications on top of a low-level framework like CI. The major distinction between the portal extensions and framework are the development on a base set of reusable modules that are common among most application types. A portal (what most people refer to as a CMS) could be used to build any kind of application. Supporting Content could be handled using a single Admin module and multiple frontend modules (e.g., blog, article, news, faq, tutorial, etc.).
For a portal, using Modular Separation gives MVC much better encapsulation and more controllable decoupling of application modules. This is an area where MVC 2 is sadly lacking largely because of Sun’s Model 2 (MVC 2) implmentation of MVC. The original SmallTalk MVC framework was designed for a typed language where something like dynamic link libraries could be used to create module-like entities.
