Page 1 of 1

CMS Guidance needed

Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 5:34 pm
by mpk65281
I apologize in advance if this question is too basic or if I am posting in the wrong forum.

I am looking to implement a very basic CMS for a website that I am developing. Right now I am thinking of coding it myself (I am new to PHP/MySQL, but have been very successful thus far in picking it up).

I am fairly certain that I can do the following: user authentication, display existing articles in a text box to be edited, and then submit them back to the database to become live.

I do not need commenting features, approval processes, headlines, etc. etc. I simply need customers to be able to load up a paragraph of text, make changes, and submit them.

HOWEVER, here are the three features that I WOULD like to add to my simple CMS which I do not think are too easy to do.

- Integrate a spell checker
- Display the text without style codes (strong, etc.) so that the client does not see the html mark-up (this part I think I can do) but also to ALLOW the client to do simple formating like making text bold without markup (like a MS Word "B" button). Basically, I am looking for a basic WYSIWYG atmosphere.

SO HERE'S MY QUESTION:

Should I stick with the self-made CMS (if so, are there any resources available to help me integrate a spell checker and pseudo-WYSIWYG environment, OR is there an existing CMS package (free or public) that would do what I need without overcomplicating the situation. I absolutely must stay with my existing layout (only a center "content" column will be accessible to this CMS) and everything must stay PHP/MYSQL (or else one of those WYSIWYG HTML cms options would have worked).

Speaking of which... Interspire's WebEditPlatnium is the perfect example what I would want (works within existing site, no extras that aren't needed, just a WYSIWIG editor with spellchecker) but it only edits raw HTML, not MYSQL databases.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Posted: Tue Oct 05, 2004 8:32 pm
by bling
I defintely wouldn't go reinventing the wheel. There are are a ton of free CMS'es out there.

The two that I like the most are Mambo and Etomite.

Posted: Tue Oct 05, 2004 9:56 pm
by mpk65281
My problem is that I don't want/need a whole new site or template. I just want to be able to define a record in a MySQL database that I want clients to be able to view and edit in a user friendly environment. I might be reading these CMS sites wrong, but they seem to be entire site solutions versus what I am looking for. One of the reasons why I do not want to introduce new elements into my site is becuase accessibility standards are of utmost importance and many of these sites do not meet the strict guidlines (at least not without a lot of tweaking). Mambo for example failed Bobby's test in many categories...too many for me to want to attempt to fix.

Am I looking for the best of both worlds? A complete (but non intrusive) solution...

Posted: Tue Oct 05, 2004 10:05 pm
by John Cartwright
What your talking about is pretty simple stuff, except for maybe a spell checker, which I have never seen or thought about before using PHP (or whatever you plan on using), and I would recommd you code it yourself.

Your overcomplicating the process, all your really looking for is a news script of some sort.

This would be a good learning experience and should avoid using other people's code at all costs :P

Posted: Tue Oct 05, 2004 10:19 pm
by denlou
That's kind of what I'm working on now, but it's for a whole setup like homestead.com

http://homepage.denlou.ca/

I suppose a bit unrelated, but I've been working on my CMS for about 6 months.
http://dcms.denlou.ca/

Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2004 2:39 am
by twigletmac
For the wsiwyg side of things, have a look at adding a new post on a vBulletin forum - the code is copyright but you can at least see an implementation of this. Use bbcode for markup (from my experience most users - and some of ours are really dim - can deal with this), you can limit what they can do and have good regular expression matching to ensure your accessibility standards are met.

Mac

Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2004 2:52 am
by CoderGoblin
For editing and alternative is to use the HTML Edit facility built into Mozilla and IE (although there are differences between them) and you need Javascript.

A good starting point is...

http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2003/midas/01/

Something else to look at if you are developing something on your own is "SQL Injection" which you need to prevent.

Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2004 8:47 am
by timvw
http://www.testmycms.info (once you're logged in, edit an item)

is using http://sourceforge.net/projects/itools-htmlarea/ and also has a spellchecker plugin etc...