Movabletype: Make the Recommended Contents function - php

I didn't have much experiences about the CMS (like wordpess, joomla or movabletype) so I don't know my task is possible or NOT.
My customer, they buy and use the CMS (MovableTypes) to make their website. So now they want me to find or write (Code) the new function for website. That function will be get and show the related blogs (entries) like for example:
"if you go to ebay and click to view a cellphone, the website will give you recommend cellphone which have same properties of the current."
In PHP, I can know how to do this, but in MovableTypes I don't know, have anyone had some experience about the MovableType.

They have documentation for extension development here:
https://movabletype.org/documentation/developer/
Whilst following their framework is usually sensible and worth taking the time to do, most CMSs will also usually allow you to find a place to just write in raw PHP via a very basic extension.
Just make sure you never edit core files.

Related

Website with login

I want to create do the following things:
1. Create a new E-Commerce website
2. Update a already made website(superbrainacademy.com)
So the second thing, I have to include a log in provision so that some people which I authorize can get to see certain extra pages than others.
In e-commerce website I want everything like they can sign up themselves, I do not want to add each person manually, they log in with their email id and password and do shopping like something like flipkart.com. Well, payment gateway is out of scope for this question. What I need to know is how to start? In what language to make all this? Any guide on this?
What I know and i have created: I know programming in html and a little bit css. I make websites from downloading some good templates or just putting nice images at back and all. See my websites to have an idea(superbrainacademy.com or octindia.com)
I thought that maybe I could achieve this through joomla/drupal/wordpress. So I downloaded xampp and installed wordpress, drupal and joomla on it. The websites that open up look basic blogs to me (sorry but i am new to it) So I have no idea whether or not what I want can be accomplished by use of any of them. I also downloaded many many wordpress templates but they looked disgusting.
So what I need: A way to create a website with login id and password (signing in and signing up) but one has to be authorized by me as the users < 20 or so and the other needs to be done automatic as users > 100 or idk maybe greater. So how should i start.
Note: I do not prefer using automatic website making like weebly and all...
I would recommend using a CMS. If your willing to put some time into it you can learn to build your own template. I haven't used wordpress but I have built templates for Joomla, it takes some time to learn probably just as much time it would take to do what you want to do from scratch. Check out their guide to building a basic Joomla template.
http://docs.joomla.org/Creating_a_basic_Joomla!_template
So it seems that, you just need an e-commerce cms, and its likes of .
My suggestion for you is to deploy a Magento installation with a prebuilt template and demo just so you know where to start, and it gets easier for you to do stuff yourself, once you get a hang of it.
There are various of Magento/osCommerce template service providers out there some of them free maybe, some of them premium. Though I strongly bias my recommendation towards Magento than osCommerce, after myself having worked on both.
Note:- I am taking about opensource here, and mostly all of these cms installations tend to be quite similar.
Update:-
About integrating a login system inside your current website, you can use a script from HERE as per your requirement and complexity.
Joomla has inbuilt ACL:
http://docs.joomla.org/J3.2:Access_Control_List_Tutorial
so that would enable you to set specific access for specific user groups eg branches
It would allow you to either:
a) let people register individually
b) you approve each registration
c) you set up each user individually
You could also combine Joomla with an eCommerce component.
I find mixing Joomla with Mijoshop (OpenCart for Joomla) a good solution.
You can install Joomla with VirtualMart. If you don't need all functionalities of joomla just disable those from back-end. If you need a pure e-commerce site you can use OpenCart (lightweight solution) or Magento which is a much more complex e-commerce solution.
Update:
The second thing couldn't be accomplished by using HTML only. wardha-Web's answer below (php login) seems to be a good choice since it's quite simple. Another sophisticated way would be to modify your existing site and put it behind to a php framework where you can define access role based authentication, but for this you need to have some php and object oriented programming skills

Which CMS for having a mixture of CMS-enabled pages and my PHP programs?

I'm creating a website which has a public-facing side, which I want selected users to be able to edit like in a CMS, but I also want to create a private intranet side which is made up of pages written in PHP by me to perform certain functions, but are not part of the CMS as such.
So basically I want:
- Some CMS-ified pages which are user-editable
- Some custom pages which use the CMS templating engine, authentication etc..
Which would be the best CMS for this?
Drupal is really good when you need this kind of flexibility. You can easily configure it to link to other pages via the menu system and TBH, it's so flexible, you'll find that anything you would want to hand code for the intranet can be done by installing and configuring existing third party modules, with the option of writing a custom module if you really have to.
We do developments like this and bring all of the intranet stuff into Drupal by putting code into a custom module and having the functions called by simple forms made in Drupal. To see data from internal DBs, tell Drupal the DB details in the config, then use the views module to make lists etc.
Not sure if it's the best, but Drupal is a very good candidate based on your description.
Your custom pages can be implemented in a module (PHP code). Specific URLs can be declared as being handled by your module and the rest of the CMS will not get in the way if you don't want to. From the point of view of your code, Drupal can be seen as a kind of framework.
I might use drupal. From what I've done with it, it seems very customizable. It's more flexible and seems more clean and secure than something like joomla. There are plenty of addon's. I haven't done enough with it to get to the point where I was interfacing my own PHP pages with it, but if I had to try anyone that's what I would go with.
I, however, personally just make my own CMS. It might be more work, but then everything is the way that I want it to be. It depends on how much you want them to be able to edit. For example, I was making a website for a shop, and so I created a place where they could add and remove items, which wasn't that difficult, especially since it was database based. To be able to do things like change menus and appearance and such might be harder...probably look towards something like a CMS.

Looking for a easy integration PHP forum

I'm building a website with codeigniter (PHP) and I'm looking for a forum easy to integrate with my current database so users don't have to register twice. Moreover, I need to use the same html head and styles that in my website, placing the forum inside a div of <body>
Could anyone recommend me any simple forum application for my situation? Thanks.
I'm not aware of CI-specific solutions, but I've used a couple times MyBB and I can say it's really easy to integrate anywhere, as (at least in the 1.6 release, I haven't use it for some time) it's structure is easily moddable. I integrated it in a Joomla! website and in a custom one, and in both ways it's just a matter of reading the mybb_users table for access; it's quite a detailed table, so you can find almost anything you need for a registration table, like salt,password,timestamp of registration,email, and so on, so you just need to query that table and you're set.
As for the integration with CI I think the best way would be to place the whole forum folder and access it there; for the header, footer and other website parts you just change the relative forum template (layout are divided into subsets of templates, so you can change it easily and in details) and the user would not notice they are different applications.
You can also try and build a CI library for communicatin with the forum; they don't have an official API, but in functions.php and a couple other files I don't remember now (yes, 1.6 was mostly procedural, hope they have changed it now) you'll find all the relevant MyBB core, so building an API is straightforward; I once built own for Joomla! and was really easy. Moreover, there's This guy who wrote an integration for MyBB which is, in fact, a nice API; I don't know how updated it is, just check, but It's not difficult to port those files to a Codeigniter custom library, in case.
For database integration you're not going to find a forum that uses the same DB architecture as CodeIgnitor. What you can do, however, is alter your PHP registration scripts (for both CodeIgnitor and your forum) to add an entry in both member records.
Depending on your database you can also use Database Triggers to automatically update the other table when one is updated.
As for your layout, anything can be modified. Open source options will be the simplest, so I'd recommend phpBB for simplicity sake.
For more information on Database Triggers in MySQL, see here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/triggers.html
I would suggest using PHPBB forum or Wordpress with the BuddyPress plug-in.
I'm not quite sure how the integration with your codeigniter would be, but seeing as PHP is open-source, it shouldn't be too hard to crack open and find out.

Survey component that can be embeded locally

I'm working with PHP and need to add a survey component. I would prefer something that allows me to embed the survey on the site. The creation of the survey itself can be off-site, no problem there, as long as the users themselves don't have to go elsewhere to answer the survey. Does something like this already exist?
There's another issue: some of the surveys may be closed surveys i.e. sent to a specific group of emails and only those can answer it. So I'm guessing the user will have to click a link which has his email and code coded as parameters. Any other ways to do the same thing that I may be missing?
I'm open to all suggestions... but would really prefer not to have to install an entire open source system for this, unless all else fails.
Wufoo and SurveyMonkey are both really good for this, especially given your requirements. I'd advise you rethink using PHP, per se, and consider embedding one of these in your site (you can control the HTML/CSS so it looks the same). Otherwise, there are quite a few options for you to evaluate... see these lists.
There exist many survey extensions. Maybe you'd like to use survey extension by Joomplace. Now I'm developing an e-commerce website so I think to buy this one. Here is their site: http://www.joomplace.com. I know that this survey supports front-end authoring and it's also possible to create different kinds of reports. Also you can define the list of users you want to address the survey to. But this is for Joomla based sites.

How to integrate a CMS into an existing website

If you were to integrate some open source CMS into your already existing website... which CMS would you choose and how would you go about achieving it?
The BEST CMSs that will work very well and may fit your needs are :
Instante Update - the best one in my opinion
PulseCMS
SiteCake
These three CMSs can be integrated into any existing Website & they are easy to use. I think they fit your needs.
you should ask the question in different order "How to migrate already existing content to open source CMS" and your action list would be
map existing data and url schema (so you could make redirects from old content to new locations if locations change) to get the hang of the amount of pages/structure that need conversion
choose your next weapon (wordpress, joomla, modx and so on dependent of your needs and amount of data) and make a clean installation of latest version
convert old site information to data import format of your chosen weapon
if your information is in start planning design, editorial and other regular tasks that each site needs
the idea here is to make the conversion first with raw data to get the clean site structure and content you really need and not mess with design and editorial tasks first as those are secondary and can be addressed separately over and over
i would go with wordpress... just download in from wordpress.org and install it into ur site, via FTP or File Manager, but you need to know how to use wordpress, everything would be very basic in PHP, they usually slice the website into three parts. Header, Body, and Footer, try to mess with it, and you could integrate it... but i think CMS is much preferrable if ur trying to create a blog-style website
You should also consider the popularity of the Open Source platform you choose. The more popular it is, the less likely it will disappear all of a sudden - and it will be a lot easier to get community support (and 3rd party modules).
For me there would be 3 choices if it has to be a PHP based CMS : Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal. I tend to prefer the latter, because it's very flexible (though it also has some quirks, especially if you're creating multilangual sites).
As for how to go about it : that largely depends on what you already have. Is it a static site or dynamic site? Have you got some scripts that wouldn't be easy to alter? Your first priority should be to list specific functionalities of your site and see if any of the CMSes you consider supports these out-of-the-box (or using 3rd party modules).
Porting data to Drupal can be very easy (using the Migrate module - Migration: not just for the birds).
Oh, and one more thing : also keep things you plan for the future in mind. If you consider building a full blown website, don't stick with something that will help you out now, but hold you back in the future.

Categories