Lately I've been trying to learn ASP.NET. I've gone through the tutorials on the ASP.NET website, but for the most part I'm a complete beginner. I've also been working on creating a personal website, which I've opted to use the CMS Umbraco because it is based on ASP.NET.
Now my questions is not really specific to ASP or Umbraco. It could apply to PHP and Drupal or any other website framework and CMS. I'd like to know when and why a website should be created using an existing CMS technology (Umbraco, Drupal etc..), and when a website should be created from "scratch" using a base web application framework like ASP.NET, PHP, JSP etc..
It depends heavily on the CMS's (module/theme) API, for instance, one Drupal modularity in my opinion is its greatest strength, although learning Drupal itself is not to be taken lightly either. I've seen a lot of commercial sites done in Drupal, most of them look successful, but it made me think what was the total cost of creating the modules, customizing it, etc.
Since you mention you are a newbie in this stuff, do take in account all the stuff to take care of when you are creating a website from the scracth:
Security (XSS prevention, sql injection, blah blah)
Authentication
A flexible theme system (unless you mix html with code... good luck, although there are some really nice template system available for PHP 5)
Database Layer (just use an ORM)
Learning JavaScript, then learn jQuery, MooTools, etc.
Administration panel
Adding stuff like content management
But most importantly, plan something before doing it. Starting out just because you feel like without planning what you want and how will you implement it creates uncertainty, just too many doubts...
So start with a CMS, even for a personal site. There are solutions like Joomla! Drupal, SimpleCMS, some django CMS are also out there. Learn the language of the CMS and start creating your own module as you see fit. Always read their documentation, search in forums before asking, or search here in stackoverflow. Really.. just ask here.. better than googling for a solution :P
You should use a CMS because it's simpler. There are a lot of 'boilerplate' code that you don't need to rewrite. Some CMSes might also contain useful code like user authentication built in. You won't have to roll it your own way, saving time and if you aren't a good programmer, it might also be more secure. Not only that, using a popular CMS means you'll also have a bunch of modules that you can just plug in and use. You can now focus more on the design than the programming in less time.
When should you not use a CMS? If a CMS doesn't provide anything you need or it doesn't allow you to do what you envisioned.
First of all it depends on whether you intend to build a real-world professional website for commercial purpose. If you do, I have to tell you it takes at least 2 years full time self-study to be able to write a web site like that. Web development is not as simple as it's made out to be (Some ppl say you could manage ASP.Net in 3 months-that's due to ignorance). Not only that, it is extremely logically challenging.
So if you only intend to write one professional web site, the best choice would be to pay someone to do it. You only learn ASP.Net when you intend have have a career.
CMS website would be enough for personal website, but maybe not professional enough for "tasteful" commercial websites. Its looks and functions all look the same, maybe good enough for local appliance repairs shop, but not good enough if you want to show your business have "taste", which also implies money
The most important feature of the CMS is its simplicity and the management of data.This is why my big sites like stanford, whitehouse etc have their sites on CMS.Managing the data is not an easy task as it seems.
For me at least it would be better to at least try to create something from scratch I know that they're plenty CMS out there that make things easier but, again ... for me the best way of learning is doing things your self and discover and solve real issues rather than just read about them. if its something for you own and you can afford the developing, troubleshooting testing.. blah blah... do it your self, if its something for a client and you you have a due date I would rather use a CMS or if you want something between a framework such Cake PHP or Codeigniter.
Related
First off, I'm new to web development. I am fairly comfortable with HTML/CSS, and I am building my first site for a friend's business. I want to include a contact form, so I downloaded one from CodeCanyon. It is perfectly fine, but I'm in this to learn how to do this, so I scrapped the downloaded form and set out to learn some PHP. (I realize that later on, from a profitability standpoint, it may be a wiser decision to use these types of plugins rather than doing it all myself; would love opinions on this as well).
I learnt how to write a simple e-mail contact form from some tutorials online, but quickly found there's much more to it when you get into address validation, and preventing spammers from hijacking your form, etc. Should I continue to try to learn how to do the whole thing myself? If so, What is the best resource available?
I noticed people saying great things about Zend framework. Can someone explain what it is in simple terms?
Also, I haven't used Wordpress yet, but it seems the best use of this (aside from using it to create quick websites on the cheap) is as a CMS so your clients can update their content later. Does Zend framework also have some kind of CMS element to it?
I know this is kind of a complicated series of questions, but I'm trying to get some clarity. To those of you who have been at this a while, all the different products, languages, acronyms, etc. may seem like a piece of cake, but to a newbie like me, its hard to figure it all out without some kind of sounding board.
Kind of an open question but:
Zend Framework is a set of libraries that help you create php applications. They have a set of predefined classes that simplify tasks like Access Control List (User Login and such) or access Google APIs (like calendar and email). To take advantage of those libraries you need to interact with them in the programing level. (that is, you need to know how to program in PHP and how to access those classes). Here's an example:
require_once('Loader/autoloader.php');
$acl = new Zend_Acl();
$acl->add(new Zend_Acl_Resource('view'));
$acl->add(new Zend_Acl_Resource('edit'));
$acl->allow('guest', null, 'view');
$acl->allow('editor', array('view', 'edit'));
This creates a User Role named guest and editor, and gives permissions accordingly.
Wordpress is a CMS (like joomla and Drupal, for instance). You don't need any PHP knowledge to create a site with these tools and you interact with the modules in the admin level. You can actually integrate Zend Framework (or any other framework) with those CMS, but then again you need not only knowledge in PHP but also in the framework itself and in the structure of the CMS.
To summarize, PHP is powerful yet relatively easy programming language. Should you decide to learn it, you should start by doing some basic tutorials like this one to familiarize yourself with the language. The learning curve might be a little steep but it pays off. Once you feel you can do most tasks, you can try to work with a framework (ZEND or SYMFONY, for instance)
If your only objective is just to build sites easily and quickly, you should use a CMS.
What's the best way to build a new social media site that will be sold B2B? My company is a b2b social media company. We've Been trying to determine if we should build from scratch or leverage Joomla.
We have 3 months before our first customers will deploy.
We have received lots of varying suggestions, it seems to be a "religious" debate.
Our platforms contains both standard as well as unique features. It is critical the themeing can be quickly and easily changed regularly. It is a SaaS.
Users will not be extremely savvy, there for the UI must be intuitive, simple and easy to use.
So, is it JOOMLA and PHP? or PHP from scratch?
3 months? Unless you have a VERY capable team that can crank out bugfree code, you're building on something else. Like syrion mentioned, coding a good CMS is not as easy as it seems. Sure, anyone could put something basic together in couple of days or ever a few hours with the right framework, but doing it right and making it scalable is a whole different story.
Joomla has its issues as does every other open source project out there. However, Joomla also has 2 very important advantages when it comes to SaaS - first, the admin is fairly easy to understand for non-tech people. Not quite as simple as Wordpress, but much more powerful. Much easier to teach than Drupal, your clients will not need to grok nodes or taxonomy. Second, Joomla was written specifically to be extended. templating is a breeze as is extension development. Their MVC is a little different but not hard to grasp. If you have decent programmers they will be able to make Joomla do anything.
Please dear god if you have the choice, don't start from Joomla. You will be much better served by picking a framework like CakePHP, Symfony or CodeIgniter. The MVC model in Joomla is essentially wrong (views pull directly from the database? yuck) and there is so much legacy code and simply bad code that your developers will end up throwing out and rewriting most of what Joomla comes with. I should know, that's what I have been doing for the past few months at work.
Joomla bundled with community builder is a viable option.
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.
My company is looking at various PHP frameworks to build a customer's site. This is a shop that has some legacy in-house frameworks and we're trying to move away from that. In my spare time, I've coded in CodeIgniter and dabbled a bit in Kohana. I have yet to use a CMS like Joomla or Drupal, but I recognize that they're built using an MVC and PAC design pattern respectively. In starting my excavation, I came to the preliminary conclusion that it might make more sense to use something like CodeIgniter to build the user-facing portion of the site and something like Joomla to build the admin-facing portion of the site, such that Joomla is never loaded unless you specifically go to admin.xxxxx.com.
So following this logic (and please do let me know if it's very flawed), I'm here to ask if anyone's ever done anything like this before, and if so, what might be the best method of taking advantage of some of the more automated features of Joomla (sorry if I don't go into too much detail here...I haven't studied Joomla enough to know everything about it....please correct any gross cognitive errors!!) from within a more lightweight framework like CodeIgniter.
Or is this going down the wrong line of thinking? My first instinct is to just link the two by data in the database and never have them communicate directly, but I just wanted to be sure this was correct before I take it to my superiors.
Vielen dank, guys
Quite possibly flawed, all of these CMS's run on assuming that they are used for both admin and user site, the major problem this causes is that code and the way things work are very intertwined meaning that a simple 'hook in to the database' often isn't enough and you'll have to use most of the CMS code just to pull / put valid data - the other caveat with that is that if the admin is upgraded, it can easily change the database schema which would break your front end.
I'd highly recommend going with one or the other, either your own design using frameworks for admin and user site(s) - or just stick to single CMS and bolt on whatever functionality you need with plugins.
Best!
I Agree with Nathan.
When you're using pre-built frameworks you lack the control factor over the core elements, this is not good especially developing for a corporate system, you need to have full control over every part of the system for future developments / integration.
My advice is to start with a small but abstract system it would be more beneficial, my advice is to use a framework like codeignighter that consists of an MVC Pattern but also plays the simplicity role with ease.
Take a look at the OpenSource application called "OpenCart" which is a small MVC Store, the reason I say look at this is because it's an extremely basic MVC Pattern and can be abstracted for your applications.
Hope this information helps.
Regards.
When your using pre-built frameworks you lack the control factor over the core elements, this is not good especially developing for a corporate system, you need to have full control over every part of the system for future developments / integration.
Well I don't know if i would necessarily agree with you about this?
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....