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.
Related
I have a PHP based website, with database connections, form processing, etc, that I need to use a CMS on. I'm trying to use Joomla but after using it for 2 days and reading tutorials on it I'm getting the impression that it's designed to handle static content and that all form processing is to be handled by 3rd party extensions.
Am I getting the wrong impression? Is there a standard way to import a PHP website into a Joomla CMS?
I inherited a Joomla 1.5 site a few months ago, so I was in a similar situation to you - where to begin, with lots of questions about Joomla, its ethos, etc. What I've learnt in the meantime is:
Joomla is very heavily dependent on 3rd-party extensions. Some of these are good, some not so good - evaluation and caution is advised.
Joomla encourages the use of extensions, even for relatively static content. Whether these are full blown 'components', or 'modules', depends on quite how powerful/flexible they need to be.
The MVC architecture that underlies everything has its positives and negatives. On the plus side, if everything is done consistently, there is a good separation of concerns and - in particular - the template system offers good configurability. On the downside, very simple components/modules have an awful lot of complexity - e.g. just in terms of number of files.
Joomla is open-source ... sort of. If your familar with the open-source community, you might be a bit disappointed with Joomla, especially when it comes to 3rd-party extensions. Many of them do not embrace the open source ethos, and try to sell code and/or support so, to reiterate, choose your extensions carefully.
Writing your own extension is fairly simple, especially if you're familiar with PHP. Although the documentation isn't great, there are some gems - in particular, take a look at:
http://docs.joomla.org/Developing_a_Model-View-Controller_Component_-_Part_1
http://docs.joomla.org/Accessing_the_database_using_JDatabase
When it comes to forms, I'm still undecided. The site I've inherited uses a third-party extension to manage them (mod_breezingforms), but it has its issues. If you have the luxury of trying out several alternatives, take it.
Run your development site in debug mode. Take a look at database queries. In my own experience, Joomla is very, very demanding on the database. For example, I have some pages that make hundreds of calls to the database with every request. Watch out for this.
At some point, you'll see itemid in the URL and wonder what on earth it is. It refers to a menu item. Menus in Joomla are a bit more general than you might think - they don't necessarily represent a 'menu' and they're quite important. For example, the built-in way to include content on a series of pages is for them to belong to the same menu item, so you might need to create 'fake' menus to house content.
Try MODx Revolution. You can insert your existing php form processors straight into Snippets with next to no modification required, or using the existing FormIt extra. Ajax is easy as pie.
Some docs to get your started:
Overview
Making Sites with MODx
Snippets
edit: apologies if it looks like I've tried to hijack this thread, somehow missed the fact the question is referring specifically to Joomla. MODx is definitely worth a look though ;)
There aren't many CMS's that can handle forms correctly (maybe only the very very generic ones, such as contact me forms, or shopping carts), but for any other purpose, you probably want to use your own PHP script to handle and process the form.
Nothing is stopping you from having a CMS on one part of the page, and your own PHP script on another.
I've once had a website with 2 different CMS's (Wordpress and Joomla), as well as some custom made pages. Slightly trickier to handle, but it's possible.
This question is very broad to answer. There are few step-by-step tutorial available on the internet for this.
From Joomla
Site Ground tutorial
If you follow this head start. You are sure to know a lot of joomla along way and convert your website to the joomla.
BUT, it is easier to build on Joomla rather than convert to it
The first trick to using Joomla effectively is to not over think things and use code that is proven so you don't have to work so hard.
Your existing content can likely be imported to Joomla just be exporting it to a CSV then importing back in to the Joomla article table.
Form handling is incredibly easy. There are dozens of form handling extensions, some of which do more than you will likely ever need. I use ChronoForms most of the time because it can be made to do basically anything once you learn how it works. I also like RSForms if you need non-tech people to be able to create forms on their own.
"Load dynamic data" in to a Joomla article is not very specific, but I'll take a stab at it. If you mean getting user submissions, then there are front end content submission options built in. If you mean loading data from another source, then you can generally use either a module or a plugin to get that data loaded either on the page or actually within the article itself.
Spend a little time getting to know how it works. Learn the difference between a component, plugin, and module and that will help you get a better grasp of what you can do. Joomla is an extensible framework, there's nothing you can't make it do and many things that are already built for you.
I would use JUMI, a Joomla component for embending your own PHP scripts. No scripts modifications are required!
Are there any PHP based CMS which could be integrated with an existing database? My client already has a big inventory solution which was written in VBA. Now we need to setup a web based shop for them and we are thinking of setting up a CMS from the shelf.
Is there any way we can integrate the current database scheme with that of CMS ?
That depends entirely on what the big inventory solution does, where it is running, how it is structured, and how the two solutions are supposed to coexist.
Usually though, you will want to make use of existing export/import functions on both sides (e.g. XML) instead of having two applications meddle with the same data base. That often ends in tears.
The issue is that the CMS would have to understand how the database was laid out. Even having a different number of columns would prevent the CMS from understanding the structure of the tables. A CMS isn't a human. It just interacts with data how it's told, it doesn't ever interpret or understand the data.
Your best bet would be to first install a simple CMS with a table prefix (something like installing WordPress with "wp_" as the table prefix) to prevent it from over-writing any existing tables. After this you would need to write a plugin for the CMS which tells it how to read your database. It may be possible to find a plugin which already does what you want and then modify it to use your table design rather than the intended one.
In either case, though, the information in a database is part of the site's content. As such it's the job of the content management system to both create and maintain it. Creating it outside of the CMS will generally confuse it and require some work to integrate it.
first of all, just for curiosity, why cms and not framework? Using framework will ensure you can fully integrate your existing database with less effort (in terms of long-time consistency and reliability).
Still, if you want to stay with CMS, I would recommend Drupal. They have nice feature which allow you to interact with multiple databases without modifying your current data structure. Furthermore, you can build your own customized modules or even installation profile to suits your need.
I have a site which contains around 3000 static and dynamic pages. I think 2900 of the pages are based on 3 different php pages which create all the 2900 pages based on database content, and it has about 100 static pages.
How difficult would it be to integrate a CMS into the website so our Marketing department can make changes to the website easily without them having to mess around with code?
That will largely depend on how your site is currently structured. Since you say about 2900 pages are dynamic, you should be able to port these in an automated fashion (again : all will depend on your actual data, this can be very easy or very hard depending on how that data is structured). Suppose for instance you were to use Drupal (just picking one of the major players here). Then you could use the Migrate module to port your existing data over to Drupal.
A nice video on how to do this is at http://dc2009.drupalcon.org/session/migration-not-just-birds (you can also find it at archive.org for easy downloading btw - DrupalCon DC 2009 - Migration: Not Just for the Birds)
That's a big question as it depends on what you want the cms to be able to do, and how much it needs to do. If time is a factor, why not use an existing third party cms and integrate your design and content into it.
They're easy to install, but again, your question is kinda vague. In the long run, a cms would probably save you time, so I'd say invest in setting one up.
That's heavily dependent of the structure of your website!
Most CMS use a template engine/system with placeholders. You need to change your existing content so it fits into the CMS system.
Or do you only want that the data is easy editable by users? Then you can try to include a WYSIWYG editor. But a page with so many sites, I think it will be more workload to put it into a CMS, but it will be more future-proof.
You will need to use a TAG based CMS.
You may add tags at the of each page (automaticaly or via the template)
and give your users to be able to edit the site page.
I think Toko Content Editor can help you with that
Editizer is a service that retrofits WordPress to existing static pages.
I'm building a new website which has one core application and many content pages. Content pages are mostly dynamic and I require a way to manage this dynamic content on a regular basis. The core application's main functionality is a 3 step process or reading user data (input page), reading data from MySQL (product page) and submitting an application to an email address (application page).
Ideally I would like to build the core application in regular PHP and leverage Drupal for its content management capabilities. Can Drupal and regular PHP be integrated as I suggest easily? My feeling is that coding the core application as a Drupal module(s) will add layers of complexity that could be difficult to code from the outset and maintain later on as the system matures - so I would really like to just use regular PHP.
Let me explain where dynamic content (managed by the CMS) intersects with the core application:
Dynamic content such as FAQ data is used both on the 'normal' help pages and also within a mini-feed displayed within core application pages down a right hand side column. In this column, 3 random questions are pulled from the database and displayed as a feed. When users click on FAQ question they are not taken away from the core application product page but are instead shown data in a pop-up window displaying the question and answer. In addition, users can browse other questions and answers through a simple navigation menu within this popup. There are 3 such like feeds as I describe above that I require on the core application product page.
So, what is the ideal solution here in terms of 'keeping things simple' for both the management of dynamic content and the ease of coding the core application? Can 'regular PHP' and Drupal co-exist 'peacefully'? If so, how is this technically possible? Because there is some content managed by Drupal contained within core application pages, can the core application still be coded in regular PHP?
Any advice / suggestions?
Thank you!
Jim.
This is part of a post I submitted few years ago. Unfortunately the linked article is long gone, but it might still be relevant for your needs:
Importing old-style standalone PHP scripts into Drupal system
Drupal system is a very strong CMS, but taking an existing PHP site and trying to force it on Drupal might be a hard thing to do.
The "right" way to convert a site into Drupal is to "Drupalize" it, which means to do everything "the Drupal way", which is really the right thing to do - but is some cases not everybody agrees about that.
I had an example with a company that has many HTML/PHP based sites. They heard about the flexibility and strength of Drupal, and decided it is their choice for the revolution. But, on the other hand, they want not to change anything, and that I will do it as fast as possible.
The "right way" to do it was to break each PHP script they have to its pieces, find the commons, create the right methodology with existing Drupal modules, and finish the gaps with my own additional module.
But this is not what they asked me to do - instead, I looked for a way to just import the existing PHP script into Drupal environment.
Searching for am existing solution brought me to a proof-of-concept described by Dan Morrison. In the bottom line it uses PHP output buffering commands it order to collect everything the old script does, and then to display it as part of a Drupal module. In my case I had to make some small modifications (mainly to pass variables from the request to the PHP in the relevant scope), but in the bottom line it did exactly what I needed.
Well, almost... In other cases, in which I wanted to enjoy from Drupal's Form API, I handled it differently, as I will describe later on.
It sounds like you are asking about two things:
Including Drupal content in a custom-built PHP application.
Displaying Drupal content in a pop-up window from the PHP application.
There are a number of different levels of integration- if your need is as simple as pulling content into a page then you may be able to simply create a view (http://drupal.org/project/views) with that content from Drupal that you can make available to and then include it in your web app.
If you are looking for a tighter integration between the 2 including sharing of users, sessions, etc... then it is likely also "possible" but would take additional information to understand what you need.
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....