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Building A CMS: Asking For Your Advice

Posted: Sat May 24, 2008 5:54 pm
by volomike
I'm not pleased with what I've seen so far with CMS packages. Here's the problem. My clients have ideas, they draw them out on paper as wireframes, scan them in, and email them to a designer. He makes the PSD. They then ship it to a chopper who creates the XHTML/DIV/CSS template. I receive the templates and then they ask me, "Make it easy to use where I can publish stuff out there without needing a programmer."

What most of them do not do is review CMS products, find one they like, and then ask me to customize it so that it sort of looks like some idea they had in mind.

So, in my opinion, CMSes go about this in the entirely wrong direction. Things need to be coded completely differently.

I really don't have time to build a CMS, but seeing as I get this request over and over again, and it's not very easy (even as a programmer) to take one's XHTML/DIV/CSS template and make it "fit" inside of Joomla or Drupal's template system, I need something else.

To me, the way it should work is that when I receive an XHTML/DIV/CSS template, I just rip out the Lorum Ipsum text and replace it with gadgets from the CMS. Some are canned, and some are custom. In my mind, the custom ones can be built painlessly and even have an integrated control panel that matches the theme of the admin system.

The gadgets are inserted into one's template by replacing Lorum Ipsum with something like:

<cms:articles section="About Town" subsection="Recent Events" />

or

<cms:section-menu count="4" />

or

<cms:custom title="Today's Poll" name="Poll1" href="gadgets/poll1.php" />

...and can be styled easily with CSS.

And the admin system should just be a mini-publishing system that lets one create sections, subsections, articles into the subsections (or into a section without a subsection), and let one BBCode the articles with a little toolbar. Nothing too complex.

And for everything else, I can just connect phpBB and build custom gadgets that tie into that. (So, if you want to comment on an article, one can tie in the hyperlink to the article in the forum.) (Note that I'm thinking of this CMS being a front-end for phpBB. If one wants WordPress and a blog-like atmosphere, then they should go with that as their "CMS" of sorts instead.)

So, anyway, if you think this vision is on track, and you like the 80/20 rule and the KISS principle, but yet like something elegant (not quite Joomla's Admin system, but close), then please give me your opinion on what you'd like to see in this thing.

Oh, and yes, if I build it, I'll give it away for free on a Creative Commons license and let people fork it until it becomes its own community-managed project.

Re: Building A CMS: Asking For Your Advice

Posted: Tue May 27, 2008 8:52 am
by JAB Creations
I can't live with any other templating system other then Phorum and Sphider. Download either one and look at how easy it is to simply move parts of the template around.

The main issue I can't stand even with those templating systems is I don't have the patience to redo all of Phorum's templates because I really can't agree with their defaults. However since I'm not really running a forum on my site that's active I don't care that much. However if you want a crowd to continueously follow updates then it would be vastly wise to stick with what you're passing to the templates per major version.

In example...

Code: Select all

<li><a {IF PROFILE->PANEL "user"}class="current" {/IF}href="{URL->CC3}">{LANG->EditUserinfo}</a></li>
Let's say this was part of version 1.0 of your CMS. I should be able to easily change my template system ONCE and not have to worry about you screwing up what that does up to and including version 1.9999x.

If you really want to push this to the limits then figure out what you'll want to do cross version. That's very difficult of course but let's say you abandon something in version 2 that you used in version 1. If you can figure out how to stretch it's usage for version 3 as well then you're thinking is golden. Of course if you can get such things to work in every version and make it so that instead of changing things constantly but instead improving existing things and adding new things as well then you'll be pure platinum as far as people keeping up with the latest versions.

In which case I'd highly recommend having a very easy to find tracking system for template changes/files/etc. Of course your absolute goal is to make it once you go 1.0 final to not need to change anything that exists.