I am developing a PHP website. The client need to update some part of the site :
for example modify the title, modify the introduction paragraph etc.
But he can also post news and add products (which consist of text + picture) via his admin interface.
I am thinking of developing his administration panel from scratch, but i would prefer to find a simple CMS that would do the job and make the dev process faster.
Most of the CMS i found online are mostly too complicated (they allow the user to create pages, templates, etc). In my case the administration panel must be really simple and restrictive, just allow the user to modify or add the content i predefined.
Do you have suggestions on CMS that would fit my criterias? Or a php library that would help me (in terms of writing the less PHP / HTML,Js code as possible)
I hope my english is not too bad and this post is understandable.
Thank you very much for your help
The learning curve can be a bit steep but I'd suggest Drupal. It's a very powerful CMS and you can set use roles with whatever permissions you want. Make yourself admin and then set up a client user role with limited permissions and you're away.
You can also download themes for Drupal or build your own. In theory you could install Drupal and a theme, set the permissions and not actually write any code.
http://drupal.org/
Drupal. In my opinion Drupal is not ideal choice. Drupal is complecated.
Joomla. A lot of info inside admin part, but you can restrict a lot of things. It's simple to use and setup. Try it.
Related
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
I know there are many multilingual wp plugins but I'm not sure which method should I use for this purpose;
I'd like to create a wp site with advanced features, partly coded by myself in php. Then I generally want to create duplicates of this site's structure, design and behavior in other languages, for example, es.blog.com would be a duplicate of en.blog.com. The content, however, shouldn't be shared.
I'd also like to keep changing the code only at one place and make those changes affect all the other languages duplicates, so I assume that means the code itself, or parts of it, would be shared.
Is there a way to have a shared structure, design and functions for several blogs, while the content of each blog is different?
I believe this is a perfect case for WordPress Multisite.
Multilingual Network (forum thread)
I would like for users to choose their language when they first get to the site - so they can choose to read, register, administer the entire site (front end and back) in either English, Kurdish (and perhaps others).
How to set a bilingual or multilingual WordPress multisite blog (blog post)
I need two independent sites to facilitate the plugins and theme localization with an easy way to switch between languages if a translation is available. Another reason is to optimize the search engine indexing. With this solution I can have some language specific posts without translation.
[ update ]
Multilingual Press (plugin)
Each site/blog can then be attributed to a different language. Simply write a post or page in one language and Multilingual-Press will automatically create a duplication of it in the other sites/blogs. These new posts and pages are interlinked and are easily accessible via the post/page editor screen - you can switch back and forth to translate them! Multilingual-Press is WordPress conform, easy to install and doesn't make any changes to the WordPress core. It doesn't harm your website's performance.
You could use any MVC framework to achieve this, and simply store the data in a database with a 'language' field and call only rows from that language.
Google 'MVC Framework'.
A good and free example would be CodeIgniter.
In CodeIgniter, you can include the Wordpress files in your 'libraries' folder then create a model with the specific functions you need to use.
Finally, you would have to create an .HTACCESS file to get the sub-domain section from the URL if you were to use this approach, however, again, there are many tutorials on achieving this, google 'htaccess URL rewrite'
I wouldn't recommend WP for any true multilingual site, searches get messed up, plugin-incompability etc.
Install parallell WP-instances in subdirs and make one the "master" for dev/bugfixes. Content is isolated and you can use standard WP-features without metadata or plugin-hacks.
By "changing the code", I presume you mean the template? It's a simple drag'n'drop in a decent ftp-client.
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.
I am designing a system for a customer. We are thinking about using Wordpress as a main platform (instead of writing our custom software), and customize it using addons or hiring developers to write some custom modules.
We need to have an ability to have some static pages, few php pages, and lot of user generated content.
What limits do Wordpress have? I have searched website, but did not found any info about for example max number of users. I am interested in experience-based opinions.
So, how Wordpress performs on multi-user websites? Or - do you think it is better to leave Wordpress, and swithch to some other open-source CMS?
Edit
The core functionality about the system will be to allow user to put text content and photos on categorized pages. Some users need an ability to have classic blog on the site, while others will only occasionally publish some content. Some data will be polled by RSS from users’ blogs on the other platform (with a respect to copyrights and legal stuff).
So as far as now I have identified a lot of blog-like functionality.
I have had some pretty good success using Drupal. If you aren't trying to build a blog there are much better things out there for dynamic CMS. Wordpress is a great piece of blogging software. Try to make it do something else? It becomes a big pain to do. Having developed "applications" in both. If a blog is not the primary component (which a news site would also follow suit) then use a true CMS and not a blogging platform.
WordPress places no maximum on users, posts, etc. beyond that of the underlying technologies (your database, mainly). WordPress.com runs on the WordPress MultiUser platform and it has six million blogs, a billion monthly pageviews, and 200k new posts a day.
Your limitations will be more structural - WordPress is designed first and foremost as a blogging platform. If its interface and methodology fit your project well, go for it, but if you're going to be hacking the shit out of it, a more generalist system like Drupal may suit you better.
If it's a blogging platform you are designing, then WordPress should fit you needs. You can also look into Movable Type (Perl).
If you are looking for a Content Management System (CMS), then you should look at Drupal and/or Joomla. Movable Type is actually starting to integrate with Drupal.
Wordpress has some performance issue, about a dozen pages/sec in default setup. But using plug-ins like SuperCache, it can get it to scale pretty well fairly easily. You can do anything you want with a custom "theme". But WordPress isn't going to manage the content in the "theme" for you, just display it.
If your doing a lot of User stuff then it's probably worth starting with BuddyPress instead of WordPress, you can still use a lot of WordPress plugins but it's better to start with a framework which is built to deal with a lot more users.
If you are interested in WordPress for a multi-user environment, perhaps you should look at WordPress MU, which is the software that runs WordPress.com. I'm not sure how the plugins work with WordPress MU as I've never looked at it in-depth.
If you need more of a social aspect, then you can refer to Tom's answer of using BuddyPress, which adds functionality on top of WordPress MU.
Depending on the type of User Generated content WP might work. You could use the Contributor Role to allow users to create content that site admins could then moderate before making it live.
Drupal seems to have more tools for Community type sites, but I have very little experience with it.
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....