I'm going to re-design and develop a new site for my client (they prefer wordpress as the new platform). They have got an existing big site with membership (with paypal), member portfolios and directories (with search) which are largely done manually in php associated with Silverstripe CMS.
I need some directions on how I best target this task with changing platforms from Silverstripe to Wordpress.
1) They want to keep their membership, directories data and migrate it to wordpress without members have to re-enter it again manually, is this possible, how can this be achieved?
2) For their membership, portfolios and directories, is it best to re-use the code, or is it too different between those two platforms? Or shall I search for some plugins to best match it and then manually add extra php code to match the existing site?
Which would be a better approach?
3) I've found some migrating companies who do migrations from Silverstripe to Wordpress with a cost, is the end product as logical as the original site? Or is it better to build it yourself in wordpress?
Anyone had experience of changing platforms, any suggestions are appreciated.
Thank you.
EDIT:
Sorry I've been away, thank you so much for your answers, Colyba, Cam and Zauberfisch, it is hard to choose one to be the answer. A little update, my client is more towards staying with Silverstripe after I used some of your knowledge, thank you.
Now I just found out they have got an offline Miscrosot Access to keep the membership details as well, my first thought was to just use the website and ditch MS Access, but their admin person has been using this MS Access for a long time even before the site was built, so I am just wondering is there anyway to synchronise both data?
I know the SS website membership database and MS Access membership database structures are set up differently, so I am just wondering is there any way to automatically update the offline MS Access membership when the SS website membership database is updated online? so they don't have to double add member details onto the offline MS Access. Any security issues? See question here, any suggestions are appreciated. Thank you very much!
I think what it comes down to is asking the client what the vision of the future or business direction is, also who will be responsible for maintaining the code base once the work is done?
I find WP has a lot of updates that need regular attention otherwise it is common to get hacked. If the client is aware of this and actions those that is good. Also does the business not have any intention of building further custom functionality other than what they currently offer to customers? if not, and the functionally is mostly commodity based stuff then sometimes WP can be the right tool for the job (even though you could do it in SilverStripe too).
However... if you are already on SilverStripe (perhaps an older 2.4 version) you could look at upgrading them to version 3 (assuming you are on 2.4) which has a much more user friendly admin interface (dare I say it more Wordpress-ish in layout) This might be more familiar to your client. If you do go this direction spend some time running your client through how to use the CMS as part of the project. I have found that helped me sell the benefits of SilverStripe when I was working as a freelancer.
SilverStripe will give you a great set of tools for future flexibility of the website (and the business). I usually feel pretty confident that when the business, say in a years time, asks for a very custom new feature to make their customers happy. I know that it can be easily built using SilverStripe's framework and made simple for CMS users to interact with that data through SilverStripe's extendable CMS interface. Also, of consideration is the licensing (we use BSD at SilverStripe), if strategically important and valuable code related intellectual property is being created, BSD allows retention of this while leveraging the SilverStripe platform. See http://www.silverstripe.org/bsd-license
So you can take more than just a technical approach in your discussions with a client.
There was this article which I quite liked http://www.chromatix.com.au/blog/wordpress-vs-silverstripe/ too.
Again, you will want to have a discussion with your client about the business plans going forward to ensure something gets put in place that can cater to those future needs. Sometimes if clients are not well educated about strategically thinking about their site it can lead to plugin bloat (just bolting on any shiny functionality without considering why) and ultimately their WP site falling over in the long term.
People are creatures of habit, they like to stick with what they know and what might have worked before... we just need to be careful not to extrapolate what used to work versus what will give you the flexibility to change in the future given we are in a very dynamic and chaotic business environment :) And particularly given that many IT systems being off the shelf commodities don't give a business any sustained competitive advantage (unique functionality and the capability to build very custom things to align with customer needs however is where business can better compete). If you and your competitor are both on WP you can both simply click a button and get the same features... how are you adding value for your customers if this is the case?
After all, value from information systems is realised through business objectives and making customers happy, and competing in business is about having something unique that others don't.
Hope my ramble helps in your decisions :) Granted I may be perceived as having a bias (after all I am the SilverStripe 'Community Awesomeness Manager' for full disclosure). When I was a freelancer, I have carried out projects in both WP and SS over the years, selecting the right tool for the job while considering the longer term needs of your clients is key. Does your client need a frozen microwave dinner or are they wanting to serve up some fresh home cooked goodness? Both can achieve the objective of being feed ;)
I fully agree with what colymba said in the comments.
what ever the reason may be, it is a bad idea to switch to WordPress with your type of content.
WordPress is a blog system, and its great at it, but doing custom stuff can quickly become rather painful.
Also, as cam pointed out, SilverStripe 3.x has great improvements over SilverStripe 2.x, so if you are still on 2.x, you should consider an update to SilverStripe 3 as alternative to WordPress (updating to SilverStripe also involves some work, as there have been many changes to how SilverStripe works, but its a lot less than migrating to another System)
Even though I strongly discourage your plan of action, I will still attempt to answer your questions (however I have not used WordPress for a complex Site, so I can't really speak to the internal workings of WordPress for this use case):
SilverStripe stores the passwords salted and hashed.
From what I can see WordPress does also salt and hash, but it looks slightly different, you might need to customize the WordPress password hasher to continue using the existing Passwords form SilverStripe.
All other Member data should be possible, just a matter of importing.
But it is for sure that you can't simply export and import your data, the schema of SilverStripe differs quiet a lot from WordPress, so you probably have to write your own import/data migrator.
Again, the architecture and data schema of SilverStripe is quiet different from the one of WordPress, so I am pretty sure you would need to rewrite the major part of your application.
Migration companies usually provide basic migration of standard data (Pages, Files and Users without any special features). your site seems to have a lot of custom features, and thus I am not sure if a company that offers migration will be what you are looking for here.
Plugins ... maybe you find one that does what you need. But the problem with WordPress plugins is that they usually do something, and if you want it slightly different, you are out of luck, so you might loose features that you previously had.
Also, a plugin (eg. for portfolio) does not solve your data migration problem.
overall, I would say its possible to do it.
However it will require advanced programming skills and a deeper understanding of how WordPress works internally.
So I recommend careful consideration before making a decision.
Related
Thanks in advance.
Learning Drupal right now as recommended by many people and I cannot get a straight answer to this question:
What are the steps to setting up a CRUD application using Drupal?
(I'll explain further. But that is the premise.)
Working on an application that will do reporting and help out a small sales company with their prospecting and data analysis. Excel right? nope. Their clients will also be needing to access some of their data live via a webapp, so there will need to be different logins with levels of access (clients will see specific data related to their account, sales people will see their accounts, and management will see everything). Here's the real kicker they would like to eventually make it into a native app for android or IOS.
Originally I was going to build it in Codeigniter... which seemed easier, but it was recommended to me that I could cut down on my workload and utilized the "services" module later to do what I am looking to get done now and in the future.
Ignoring the project, I haven't even been able to figure out how to create a form for inputing data (I was assuming "Webforms"). Have that stored to a database, and then displayed in a sortable table.
I have searched around and can't really find a guide to building a simple CRUD application using Drupal as a CMS. I am totally willing to figure out how to put it together if someone could just tell me what modules/ things I need to do.
Example (INCORRECT)
1) Install these modules: Webform, views, CCK, Webform MySQL Views)
2) Activate the modules
3) Configure _ to interact with a specific database Table
4) Et Cetera
In all fairness, I'm still learning how to use Drupal and Doing CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) type interactions might now be possible. If it isn't possible then I apologize for your reading all the way down.
Cheers + Happy Summer
Make sure you're using Drupal 7 (which has CCK built in). Then create one or more content types for the things people will see. Install Views and use that to build the displays for each role (Views is pretty powerful). You'll need to research which node access module would help you best restrict add/edit/delete privileges.
However, you said CodeIgniter is an option (ignoring the fact that CI is not maintained anymore). Any reason why Drupal was recommended instead of another PHP framework like Silex/Yii/Symfony/ZF2/LAravel? Depending on client needs (and how flexible they are) you may find yourself fighting against how Drupal wants to do certain things. If they eventually want to power more than a website via an API, seems like a non-Drupal solution could be better fit. (Until Drupal 8 is out and changes things up a bit)
I have been looking round for an open-source CMS framework that I can use as the basis for a few web projects. I used to use Joomla, but I found it to be clunky and out-dated, certainly too complicated for the average user that would be faced with it.
My current project requires a content-managed website, with all the usual stuff, and on the whole PyroCMS seems well suited to the task. However a core requirement of the project is that it contains four blogs. A general one for news relating to news in the client's field and then one each for the three members of the company.
I can't see how to do this as it stands, but I'm sure it must be possible somehow. I'm happy to write a module myself to do it if needs be, but I'm trying to keep the project fairly simple, and I can't be the first person to want to do this!
I'd considered a Wordpress network, but a key requirement is that everything is centralised in one administrator panel.
In summary - is there any way to maintain several blogs using just PyroCMS and addons?
Thanks,
Ian
There are a few outstanding features that have never really been added into PyroCMS as they have never really been needed by anyone with enough interest or ability to add them.
The blog module is VERY basic, but it has always been used by incredibly simple sites. "Mom and Pap" websites, simple "News" sections on corporate sites, developer blogs, etc.
Out of the box it CAN be done, by making a pages for "blog" and a category for each, then use the {pyro:blog:posts number="10"}{title} {summary} {/pyro:blog:posts} tags.
It's not the cleanest solution, but remember that most development on PyroCMS is done by developers finding gaps that need to be filled for client projects. I have a client project coming up soon that requires multiple categories (surprised it took so long!), which would solve this problem perfectly, but until they pay me to work on it I just don't have the time. If you want the feature added in for your job I can help you with it if needs be through giving advice on here, in the forums, on IRC etc, then we can merge it in easily enough.
I'm looking to build a online store. However, the first question, past the idea of the store, is the platform. I've previously worked with Java and PHP and am quite comfortable with PHP. So my first considerations were Drupal or maybe CodeIgniter (which I have heard lots of good things about)
On discussions with friends, they suggested Django. But I have no experience with Python or Django.
So my question is, is CI better or Drupal? And further, if not either of them, is Django better in terms of ease of development and extensibility?
Request you to not make this a php vs python battle as I'm looking for advice here. Thanks
Edit: More information about the project:
The Project is intended to create a web-store for certain products which aren't currently sold online. The store will have high-resolution images of the products and other associated details. A few other special features related to the products will be added on in time so they aren't that important.
Another clarification: I understand that Drupal is a CMS and not a framework per so. The only reason I compared it to CI was due to the base platform - php. Perhaps the better comparison would have been Joomla vs Django (but I'm not sure as I do not know enough about either, yet)
Choosing a framework for a project you already know what will be the purpose will only slow your development down. If your project's main goal is to be an online store, then pick your choice among the many projects already implemented for you with payment gateways, shipping options, product management, etc. A framework may offer all that too, but will not be ready-to-use out of the box and you will have to bind everything together yourself. My personal opinion is that frameworks are good candidate when you need an highly customized web application that you will write from scratch, that will not only do e-Commerce but handle other specific business models too.
General purpose CMS such as Drupal, WordPress, etc. are good if you plan to extend your online store to also offer other options (i.g. forums, blogs, multimedia/interactive contents, etc.) If you choose to pick this avenue, I would suggest you download the source code of each CMS you retain and play with it for a while and pick the one you feel the most comfortable with, and which has a good user community. Because there's nothing worst than being stuck with someone else's broken code with no one to help you out.
For e-Commerce solutions, you can find many good projects here. If I may choose one to suggest, a solution that you may consider as it looks simple, it is written in PHP and has good reviews is OpenCart
A good one I have worked with is the Instinct e-Commerce plugin for WordPress. I don't necessarily like WordPress, but that plugin is fairly good and will have you get your online store up and running in no time. The plugin also enable you to code new custom payment gateways fairly easily (just one file to code...)
CI and Django are frameworks that help you build a web application from scratch, if you are willing to do this - go ahead and try it. There should be plenty of modules available that allow you to easily extend the framework.
Drupal however is a CMS, so it comes with multiple plugins already installed and is able to manage your content. You'd still need to develop the "store" functionality - payment, listings, etc. - yourself.
If the CMS fits you perfectly now and in the future then CMS, otherwise framework. The framework will allow you total liberty for the price of time spent on development
Have you read and heard about JOOMLA i think its very poweful CMS in php and has a lot of community support as well, In java LifeRay is a good option.
I'd only use a framework if the requirements can not be engineered into an existing cart CMS.
I'd use a CMS over a shopping cart if the commerce aspect was relatively trivial
I'm surprised you're not considering an off the shelf cart. Open Cart is pretty extensible, and Trading Eye has a nice CMS component.
I would generally advise to stick with a language you know for important projects, although I like Python as a language much more than PHP, and Django is a nice framework.
Drupal is not only a framwork, but also a CMS. You can build an online store with some modules (Ubercart), so I would recommend to try that and see if the stock solution fits to your needs.
I suggest you have a look at Drupal's repository of modules -- in particular those in the e-commerce group here: http://drupal.org/project/modules?filters=tid:104&solrsort=sis_project_release_usage%20desc
There's a ton of them that could really help to speed you along on this project.
If you know PHP and have a good grasp of HTML/CSS/JS, you should do OK in Drupal too.
Choose Django if you want to learn Python/Django and use them in your future projects. Django is cool and you'll have fun learning Python. And you'll be able to make an informed decision for your next project.
However, if you have a budget/timeframe or just want to make this project out of the door without needing to learn a new framework I'd suggest choosing a tool/language you're familiar with.
The Bricksett CMS will build the website for you but you can also modify it using PHP for additional functionality. Modify its CSS for a better look and feel. The layout is also simple yet it has a design distinct from other CMS.
A new addition to open-source CMS
Yahoo has something like a specialized CMS for online stores, called Yahoo Stores. They make it very easy to set up an online store, and provide other logistical services. You may want to take a look at that. Of course, they take a small percentage from your sales.
I'm in the process of designing a PHP-based content management system for personal use and eventually to be distributed. I know there are a lot of CMS's already out there, but I really haven't found one that meets my all of my needs and I also would like to have the learning experience. Security is a large focus, as are extensibility and ease of use. For those of you out there who have built your own CMS, what advice can you offer? What features are essential for a core? What are must have add-ons? What did you wish you knew before starting? What's the biggest potential roadblock/problem? Any and all advice is welcome.
Edit: Any advice on marketing do's and don't's would also be appreciated.
In building a few iterations of CMSs, some of the key things turned out to be:
Having a good rich text editor - end-users really don't want to do HTML. Consensus seems to be that FCKEditor is the best - there have been a couple of questions on this here recently
Allowing people to add new pages and easily create a menu/tab structure or cross-link between pages
Determining how to fit content into a template and/or allowing users to develop the templates themselves
Figuring out how (and whether) to let people paste content from Microsoft Word - converting magic quotes, emdashes and the weirdish Wordish HTML
Including a spellchecking feature (though Firefox has something built-in and iespell may do the job for IE)
Some less critical but useful capabilities are:
- Ability to dynamically create readable and SEO-friendly URLs (the StackOverflow way is not bad)
- Ability to show earlier versions of content after it's modified
- Ability to have a sandbox for content to let it be proofread or checked before release
- Handling of multiple languages and non-English/non-ASCII characters
Well, building your own CMS actually implies that it is not an enterprise-level product. What this means is that you will not be able to actually implement all features that make CMS users happy. Not even most features. I want to clarify that by CMS I actually mean a platform for creating web applications or web sites, not a blogging platform or a scaled-down version. From personal experience I can tell you the things I want most in a CMS.
1. Extensible - provide a clean and robust API so that a programmer can do most things through code, instead of using the UI
2. Easy page creation and editing - use templates, have several URLs for a single page, provide options for URL rewriting
3. Make it component-based. Allow users to add custom functionality. Make it easy for someone to add his code to do something
4. Make it SEO-friendly. This includes metadata, again URL rewriting, good sitemap, etc.
Now there are these enterprise features that I also like, but i doubt you'll have the desire to dive into their implementation from the beginning. They include workflow (an approval process for content-creation, customizable), Built-in modules for common functionality (blogs, e-commerce, news), ability to write own modules, permissions for different users, built-in syndication, etc.
After all I speak from a developer's point of view and my opinion might not be mainstream, so you have to decide on your own in the end. Just as ahockley said - you have to know why you need to build your own CMS.
If you ask 100 different CMS users about the most important thing about their CMS, you'll probably get 80+ different answers.
The biggest roadblock is probably going to be people asking you why you built a new CMS from scratch.
If you don't know the answer to that question, I'm not sure why you're going down this path.
One thing to keep in mind is that for an internet CMS, folks are going to want integration points with many of the "usual" services. Leverage existing services such as photo sharing sites, Twitter, OpenID and the like before building your own proprietary solutions.
well i wrote a CMS for personal use and released it to the biggest chorus of chirping crickets ever! no biggie, though. i did learn a lot and i encourage you to move forward. my clients use it and like it and it's holding up fine.
but if i were to start over (and i might) here's the advice i would give myself:
scrub everything everything everything entered from the user
user administration is a product differentiator. bonus points for being able to handle someone copy/pasting from WORD.
extensibility. 90% of the comments i get are from developers who want to use the cms to host "some" of the website pages but not others. or they want to embed their custom scripts into the page among the content. my next cms will be as modular as i possibly can handle.
many folks are absolutely fanatic about clean urls.
From marketing point of view:
1) Make it templateable.
2) Make CMS SEF and have SEOed URLs.
If you need to build custom functionality where your CMS is really a window to the rest of your business layers, then use something like PyroCMS or FuelCMS which are based off of CodeIgniter framework.
Developers usually get lost in the weeds with Drupal and Joomla! / Wordpress quickly become spaghetti code-laced doozies over time. Its how much you have already drank from the Kool-aid punch bowl.
I know this isn't a direct answer to what you're looking for but if you haven't looked at it yet I'd recommend checking out CMS made simple. It has much less bloat than other CMS's and is fast and efficient. It's open source so it may be a good reference point for any questions you will run into.
Just use Drupal.
Out of the box it is very light and fast. You add modules for virtually everything, so that can be daunting but it is fantastic.
Its secure (NASA and The White House use it), its modular, its open-source, it is well supported, has a reputation for clean APIs, and has hundreds of modules from SEO to Wysiwyg....
There are hundreds of shopping cart solutions available for every platform, and all hosting plans come with several already installed. As a developer I understand that most of these are fairly similar from a user perspective.
But which ones are built with the developer in mind? For example, which ones have a decent API so that my custom code doesn't get mingled with the core code or which ones have a well thought through template system so that I can easily customize it for each new client?
osCommerce is one of those products that was badly designed from the beginning, and becomes basically unmaintainable as time moves forward. Addons are patches, and custom code modifies core. (Unless things have drastically changed since I last looked at it - judging by the version numbers, they have not).
While probably at a bit higher level than you seem to be asking, Drupal is a very attractive platform. It is a CMS at its base, and using ecommerce or Ubercart you can turn it into a store. With modules like CCK and Views you can build very sophisticated ecommerce sites (specialized product types, attributes) with very little coding, plus you get all the CMS tools (editing, access control, etc) for free. If you write your own modules, you can hook into almost anything in Drupal without touching the core code, and you get a ton of flexibility.
Though a lot of developers may not consider it simply because they're stuck in this view that they should write something from scratch, Drupal is a really great development platform for this sort of thing. There is definitely a learning curve to it, especially when you need to write modules for it, but the time it takes to learn and implement a site is still probably less than writing a very customized ecommerce site from scratch.
Magento would be a good choice. It is based on the Zend Framework and is massively open and customizable. Something a real programmer (as opposed to a designer/developer) could really work with.
Magento is pretty good, and really powerful, but getting to grips with how to go about extending/replacing things is pretty tricky. The codebase is massively flexible, and just about anything can be replaced or extended, but there's very little documentation on how to go about doing it.
There are plenty of 3rd-party addons, for different payment-providers and other things, and the built-in download-manager handles the installation of these, as well as upgrades to the core code, really well.
Compared to something like OSCommerce though, it wins hands down.
I've just discovered opencart which so far I am impressed with.
How about ZenCart? It's open source so you can read and modify the source directly.
There's also a decent template system.
What about prestashop ? It's based on Smarty and there's a detail explanation on how to write a module.
I think Megento is the best but it has very long list of fratures and matains many more tables which is some times creating problem. If you have to create very large shop must use megento unless use zen-cart. I have used almost all shopping cart but my first prefreance is megento for large site and zen-cart for alltype of shops.
osCommerce seems to be pretty popular, and advertises ease of integration as one of it's main features.
I would second the Magento suggestion. It has a modern code base and is designed with extensibility in mind. It also has multi-site, multi-language capabilities engineered in from the start. It's open source and seems to have a disciplined development team (with a MySQL AB -like business model) behind it .
Here is a good review of carts:
http://php.opensourcecms.com/scripts/show.php?catid=3&cat=eCommerce
Although the voting doesn't seem to reflect a lot of the feedback from the users, so I would suggest reading the comments to find out pros cons of each
Moltin is built with developers in mind and is purely an API. You can choose the parts of the API you want to integrate with whatever frontend you have. You also get a dashboard to manage your store if you want to use it.