I know this question would have run across in the minds a lot of people till now, but let me rephrase it according to my doubts.
Amongst some of the more popularly known CMS, what are some of the most distinctive features that make you use a particular one?
Factors that you can consider are
Flexibility (The degrees of websites that can be made Out of the Box)
Ease of Use and Reliability (Wordpress can perhaps win here. You get the cue?)
Extensibility (Availability of plugins and addons - much like Joomla's playground here)
Extensibility ease (How easy is the API to learn. SilverStripe probably sucks at this with its not so learner friendly framework. (e.g jQuery scores high here although not a CMS :D)
Code Quality (can get a little subjective here)
Support and documentation (easy to learn and develop along)
Any other rather distinctive feature!
Please be descriptive as this will help me choose a particular CMS for my website!
The Objectives of my Site:
Something like in.com ( like a site having pretty much everything )
Mainly needed for my Institute and its related events (dynamic user content generation and Delivery)
From my experience with Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal:
It seems that you need a lot of flexibility for this kind of site. I think Drupal wins hands down here with Views/CCK (AFAIK Joomla and Wordpress only support it on a low database-access level)
Worpress has an excellent admin interface, I agree. I think it's the winner here - although I haven't seen how it scales to larger sites.
All three have a lot of plugins. The only thing I can say here that Joomla's plugin ecosystem kinda annoyed me, because most of the good (or even acceptable) ones cost money, and many free ones have that fishy-'90s-freeware feel to them. Aside from that - it's a draw.
Drupal has a very flexible, and in my opinion, relatively elegant API (even though it's not OOP). However, it's pretty big, so it's not 100% trivial to learn.
Wordpress has a pretty small API, so I guess it's... easy? But kinda lacking.
Joomla has a new (from the time I've used it) OOP framework, that I haven't used - but it looks like it's as complex as drupal but doesn't (?) have some nice features like Drupal's fine-grained templating and template inheritance or an easy way to change plugin/core cms forms/html without changing the actual plugins/core cms files.
The winner for me - Drupal. Sub-themes, theme functions, form_alter... etc.
When it comes to quality of code - in the main package, all three seem pretty solid.
The documentation for Joomla and Drupal is lacking IMHO. It's all over the place, and most of the time you'll probably use their code browsers to figure out the important things. Wordpress has an advantage of having a small enough API to fit in a couple of pages (that are pretty easy to use to boot).
As I said earlier - Drupal's main advantage is CCK/Views and a flexible API. With those, you're not as limited to specific plugins' functionality as you are in other CMSes.
As you can clearly see, my current favorite is Drupal, and it seems to be a very common opinion on Stack Overflow.
But!
In my opinion, if the site is sufficiently big/complex, and the site you've linked to certainly is, it's better to go with some nice framework (Django, RoR, or if you're only know PHP - Kohana or something) instead of a CMS.
At some point, trying to make the CMS do what you want, becomes more of a bother than writing it "from scratch" (in quotes because good web frameworks does a lot of the work for you).
Just thinking about making in.com's front page in one of those CMSes makes my brain hurt.
Complexity
Joomla has 4,500 files in it. WordPress has only 700. The user interface is correspondingly more daunting in Joomla.
Having said that, the one time I did a Joomla site it was fairly easy to make it look like a specific design. Just be aware of what you are getting into.
Definitely Extensibility ease. A CMS / framework must not take ages to learn how to use it.
There are no distinctive features. It's all in how it's all coming together.
Related
Having been dong research on codeigniter,kohana and fuel php, they seem excellent for the large scale project I want to create with various sections of code. The system I want to build is to be a core set of code, which can produce a full ecommerce web application with plenty of modules, or can produce a simply few page site, with a news or gallery or whatever.
I have started thinking that I may be looking at the wrong thing for producing basic sites. From my very brief research, it seems (atleast on codeigniter) I need to use the 404 overwrite to point to my pages controller in order to handle basic content pages (from the base url /).
Should I consider a seperate code set for the basic sites, and use these frameworks only for large web apps, or is this the normal way frameworks would handle serving basic content pages.
I personally have a core framework (MVC/CodeIgniter) which I use for even the simplest static sites - Because someone will always say "Oh and can we have a shop" or a contact us form or ...
The overhead of the frameworks themselves is negligible if they're not doing any work - so why not put them in?
Another bonus is that you now know exactly what environment your modules will be in - you don't need to worry about maintaining one versions for sites with the framework and one for those without (One other benefit of using a framework is that it makes if far easier to maintain code in general - especially in multiple-developer environments.)
Th templating engines provided by most frameworks (or easy extensions to them) are often useful even for static sites (custom controls like a news ticker or custom markup/js validation for certain controls)
In short, unless you have extremely limited server resources (mobile device?) use a framework
Edit:
I'd add a note of caution - PHP is a very flexible, powerful language and when used well can create some truly fantastic sites. When used poorly, however, it is easy to make insecure websites.
From your post, you seem relatively new to PHP/Frameworks. Can I suggest you make sure that the framework you pick enforces good behavior (as much as possible)
CodeIgniter removes unsafe $_POST and $_GET variables, replacing them with safe equivalents. It also provides a parameterised mechanism for querying the database which helps avoid SQL inection attacks. These are important things to consider when comparing frameworks.
I personally found CodeIgniter to be a good balance of maintainability, security, extensibility and functionality.
I would consider using a CMS for the basic sites, something like Drupal, they do a lot out of the box and should satisfy your requirements for a basic site.
As for the eCommerce part, from experience its best use something that is separate from the CMS. Largely because projects or frameworks that are designed for that sort of thing are generally an application.
CMSes do what they do they do best, but that all they really do :)
Also have a look at Magento for your eCommerce needs.
Hope this helps.
I think your question is about what to use for "basic websites".
Should I consider a separate code set for the basic sites, and use
these frameworks only for large web apps, or is this the normal way
frameworks would handle serving basic content pages
If by basic sites you mean websites that have little to no dynamically drawn content, I would suggest a CMS such as Wordpress. You mention that you are using PHP and Wordpress is a very popular option. If you are creating a blog and a very static pages, this will be a great option. It can even be modified to do more 'dynamic' things that can be considered "CMS Territory". Once you get the basics of Wordpress down, and if you still feel that you need to modify it a lot, then you should look in to a framework that will allow you to have total control such as Codeigniter, Cakephp, etc.
Hope this helps.
Ben this is an interesting topic and no matter which direction you eventually go it would be nice to know your choice of combination. Depending on your requirements.
For something with medium range functionality OSCOMMERCE might be worth a check on. Also see Zencart, Virtumart and Megento.
I am creating the cms for a relatively simple site - portfolio, some general content pages, custom blog etc.
What are some of the best patterns to consider before diving into the design.
I want the system to be as flexible as possible without being too complex.
I have looked for some good resources that discus cms and blog design but can't find anything too good.
My language is php but I suppose I am looking for more language independent advice.
Flexibility without complexity... nice program.
Maybe you're a genius and you will make something that feet your needs. But I think the biggest problem you will face is security and robustness. So really, take other advices on this page and have a look at wordpress, drupal, joomla and ezpublish. A lot of security stuff is already done. And not only security...
So, study some of these tools, track their flaws, check their security policy. Study how they handle caching, sessions, bootstrap, absolute & relative url managment, documents (images, videos, etc), ajax, authentification, identification, acl, user interfaces, rich-text editing, migrations, templating, page composition, content filtering (I try to remove the things you won't need, plugins, database abstraction, fine caching, css and js minification, all the extra-complex stuff not needed for a single instance simple CMS). Soon you'll have a 'picture' of the stuff they've done.
By doing this work, you'll certainly notice some big differences, and mistakes. You'll start going on irc and flaming developpers, telling them that others have done better choices. You'll start forgetting to shave. You'll maybe do some contributions. Some will be accepted, others won't. Old core devs doesn't like when someone explain why they made mistakes (and they make mistakes).
Now, comes the day you have a beard. Some of your contributions will start looking like forks. You will have ennemies, and friends, or followers. And you will start feeling the force.
And you will go on irc and tell god that the world is ugly and that you'll make the first CMS which will be flexible without being complex. And people will cry. And birds will run in circles. And you will be able to explain what are the design pattern of a CMS.
I am a user. I know what I want. Doing what I want will make user happy. I'm happy.
You shall not trust code from people with glasses
"MVC MVC MVC" : and the people responds 'that shall be done'
Seriously, There's still a place for a good CMS with disruptive innovation, the fork history has started long time ago with phpNuke (as far as I can remember). But some of the actual products are really fine for most tasks.
I'm probably risking the reputation here, but my experience shows that building your own CMS can be a very justified decision, especially when you get familiar with current opensource systems and understand what exactly they lack in terms of features, security or what not. Open-source often means a lot of backward-compatibility concerns and bad architecture decisions that cannot be easily changed.
I strongly suggest that instead of just taking on MVC you take a look at ideas that make it attractive.
One main problem with CMSes is the range of technologies involved in driving dynamic web-sites: imperative php for logic, declarative SQL for data queries, markup HTML for interface, imperative/functional javascript for dynamic interface, JSON for ajax calls etc. To keep the system manageable you have to keep these technologies in a controlled and understandable environment, but yet allow for smooth integration. Knowledge and best practices are out there. MVC is but one approach to manage this problem.
My choice at the time was to use the following principles:
Object-oriented code with static calling (php is a one-run thing, many instances of code objects are rarely justified), nothing except for one line of init code in global context
100% code-design separation with the use of XSLT and custom content processor
Custom router that can take any http request and reroute it to registered methods
Custom content processor that can take arbitrary method output and convert it into any usable format such as xhtml, xml, json etc. based on the request parameters (i.e. http://local/class/method.xhtml, http://local/class/method.json)
One copy of code for as many virtual web servers as necessary
SQL query builder (chosen for flexibility over ORM) for all database queries
Mandatory filtering of method input with filter_* functions
I believe you can choose a few that you like :) And good luck!
A good pattern to start with is the Model View Controller pattern, or MVC.
This pattern suggests to seperate your application's logic in the following layers: data logic(model), manipulation or business logic (controller) and display logic (view).
This is a good pattern to start with as you'll run into other problems (and thus patterns) along the way.
The following website explains the MVC concept quite well: MVC Principles
There is no point reinventing the wheel unless you are trying to better it in anyway.
THere are a lot of CMS available already. I personally have worked with ezpublish. There are other options such as drupal etc. This is the list of all open source cms avaliable - Click here
If you are just trying to learn then you can perhaps pick any one of the popular opensource and work on them to find its architecture and design.
Besides, I dont think anyone can give you a list of design patterns that would be best for a CMS tool. Because each design pattern solves some particular problem. And, you just have to choose a design pattern depending on a specific problem you want to solve in your project.
These days, writing your own CMS is a horrible waste of time. The usual open source solutions -- these days Joomla, WordPress and Drupal are popular -- are written by thousands of people and while you might loose a little flexibility by using on that's ready made this is by far offset by not needing to redo everything from scratch. If you go with Drupal, you can also enjoy high quality, massively scalable etc code :)
If Your rquiremnt is portfolio, some general content pages, custom blog only, Wordpress will be simple and Better.
In PHP so many CMS available , most popular one is Joomla.
I am drupal user normally but we just landed a fairly big project that sort of feels as if it would be better made outside of drupal, because of flexibility and performance and all of that.
Basically the only advantage in drupal is 2 or 3 things, the permissions system is in place, brilliant we would not have to create this.
Two, views is simply awesome, we don't have to spend all of our lives writing queries
Three, well generally a lot of stuff is "configurable", you write less code but perhaps at the expense of performance or flexibility.
So now to my question, is there any Framework or lib or CMS in PHP that is a little bit more lightweight than drupal, has a little bit more flexibility even though you'd have to do more stuff from scratch but maybe not "ALL" of it, if the permsisions part would be included and only that I am a happy guy.
Another awesome thing would be if this framework/lib/cms had some sort of permission based mapping between stored procedures in MySQL and the group/role of the user in the backend, that way I could easily tell the backend Group/Role X will have permission to execute [Insert stored procedure list here] , etc... or if it had ORM/ODM included that'd be nice as well.
Any ideas?
Thanks in advance everyone.
It sounds to me that you never really have used Drupal, not as a developer in any regard. Drupal is a CMS, but it's also a CMF. That is, it a framework to make your life as a developer very easy.
It's also extremely flexible, probably the most flexible CMS there is of it's size. Its flexibility can primarily be seen two places.
Hooks
This is a system within Drupal, that allow you to change what drupal should do when a thing happen. Like a user logging in, a form being created, a page being displayed, a node being deleted. You can react to almost anything and tweak it to do exactly what you want.
The theme system
Through the theme system you can alter how Drupal outputs any markup. There a many functions and templates defined in Drupal, that you can override and have Drup use your own to create the markup you want.
Performance
In regard to performance, I can say I know of sites with more than 100 million visits each month. So you can really make high performance sites with Drupal.
I think the things you find lacking in Drupal, is more a testament of a lack of knowledge on your part than the lack of Drupal. Drupal already has what you need, you only need to learn how to take advantedge of what's in Drupal already.
The things you find lacking
The debate is that I need a PHP Framework/Drupal with the flexibility to add custom features to a potentially large application (web and with an api).
However, with a framework, like Kohana, I see myself tackling and re-inventing the wheel with the simple stuff like account management and cms stuff. Account management and quick data collection, like fast form creation, are tedious in Kohana but appear incredible simple in Drupal. On the other hand, based on my limited Drupal experience, I doubt building rapid custom "features" and allowing users to create "groups" and to manage their own roles within those groups is something Drupal can easily accomplish.
To simplify, is Drupal capable of true Web Applications; where the application is a service and provides custom results to each user? Can it provide a dashboard-like interface for users to change their settings or preferences? Can it aggregate data from particular users to provide better results/info to others?
If so, please point me to some knowledge :-)
I'll admit right away I'm a big fan of Drupal and I have never used Kohana, so this post will be one-sided.
In the company I work for they use Drupal or Zend Framework for pretty much all projects (Drupal being in the majority). Many ZF-oriented people dislike Drupal as it's structure is so far from the object oriented ZF-stuff, and Drupal is "just an CMS". As I see it Drupal is more of a Framework than "just" a CMS, and the best part being that it is incredibly flexible: everything is possible.
And yes there is indeed a module for everything. To be more specific:
On the other hand, based on my limited Drupal experience, I doubt building rapid custom >"features" and allowing users to create "groups" and to manage their own roles within >those groups is something Drupal can easily accomplish.
I can only guess what you mean with rapid custom features, but imo it's easy to expand Drupal with your own modules. Most features are available as (free, community contributed) modules, and many advanced looking features can be easily created for example with the "views" and "cck"-modules.
http://drupal.org/project/cck
http://drupal.org/project/views
Creating groups:
"organic_groups" ( http://drupal.org/project/og)
"og_user_roles" ( http://drupal.org/project/og_user_roles )
These modules together are what you need to create groups that have group spefic roles (and roles having specific rights). There are probably other ways than using "og_user_roles", but I'm advertising it because I've made a few patches for it a few years ago. The problem is usually a bit too many options.
If you want to extend group specific options you could code your own module, but most likely you don't need to because there already is a module for it. For example, there are at least 120 modules that integrate somehow with the "organic_groups"-module:
http://drupal.org/taxonomy/term/90?page=19
To simplify, is Drupal capable of true Web Applications; where the application is a >service and provides custom results to each user? Can it provide a dashboard-like >interface for users to change their settings or preferences? Can it aggregate data from >particular users to provide better results/info to others?
In short, yes. There are so many ways to achieve something you described. But probably they would involve at least the excellent "views"-module. I think of views as some kind of ultimate abstraction SQL layer and UI for anyone. And there are over 300 modules that somehow integrate with Views... ( http://drupal.org/taxonomy/term/89?page=55 )
This sounds that Drupal is all about the modules.. and I know some of my collegues even dislike it for that, because you never get to code fun stuff because it's already been done. At least you can look at the module code and learn from that. Or laugh at it, there's lots of badly programmed modules around too.
When you get to coding modules, you'll probably need lots of time to get used to the Drupal API, Forms API, Module hooks, the Theme override system, and the endless options from contrib modules. But it's worth the trouble.
I find this site very usefull to find a module for some specific need. The site shows the same module info as Drupal.org, but also user feedback/ratings, to find the best option:
http://drupalmodules.com/
If it's unclear, my answer would be go with Drupal :)
PS: D7 should be out very soon. Some might wait for it instead of starting with D6. During D5 people would wait a long time before upgrading to D6 because of missing modules. I believe for D7 the most important modules will be available for D7 very fast. Some research at the moment (04.12.2010):
About 190 modules promise to have a Drupal 7 version the day D7 is released:
http://drupal.org/project/modules?solrsort=sort_title%20asc&text=d7cx&display=table
About 130 modules are already available for D7 (most are included in the previous link):
http://drupal.org/project/modules?filters=drupal_core:103&solrsort=sort_title%20asc&text=d7cx&display=table
EDIT: As a newbie I'm only allowed to post one link, so, I removed http:// from the drupal.org-links
I worked with both Drupal and Kohana.
In my insight it really depends what you want to do. If you are going to make a web application that needs to grow a lot and should be flexible for it's growth then I recommend using Kohana. Kohana is made to keep your codebase clean and supporting in DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself). While it likely doesn't have as many modules as Drupal it does have some Auth and ACL modules.
If you want to be done fast and you don't mind making your application out of others their modules Drupal will get your work done fast. But keep in mind that when you are going to extend you will most likely run into problems that come from modules you don't know. Also it takes a bit flexibility from you.
Ultimately it's your choice. But I recommend using a MVC framework if you are going to write it from scratch.
There is no impossible thing to accomplish. The question is do you want to work with someone else code and try to figure out how to dig inside and extend so it can fit your needs or you want to go with a light framework like Kohana or maybe CodeIgniter(my personal favorite) and drive your own car, although you might need to "invent" some of the wheels.
Go ahead and research what plugins are there to your framework of choice as there are a lot of frameworks providing very good solutions which can provide you with these wheels.
In my personal opinion the time you will spend studying Drupal will be equivalent to the time needed for you to create your basic CMS functionality, but the nerves you will use dealing with stuff out of your control like the core Drupal code will shift the scales in favor of Framework.
The fun stuff about Drupal is what the community calls jokingly rule #35: there is a module for it. Unless you want to do something really tricky, you will often find that the functionality has already been implemented and you just need to configure it.
I am new to both Drupal (7.12) & Kohana (3.2.0)... My experience thus far is that Kohana's documentation SUCKS (or at least, what I've seen of it). And if their website and/or forum is written in Kohana, it sucks as well (slooooow, with overlapping fields, etc.). Whereas with Drupal, it has been clean and so far, very efficient (as best I can tell thus far).
I guess I'm wondering if the comments thus far were focusing on Drupal 6.x and haven't taken into consideration the more recent innovations in Drupal. Any thoughts/comments? Thanks.
As a newbie web developer, I can tell you that you need to analyze the use cases for your web application very strictly. If you are able to cover at least 75% of the use cases you foresee, that's a good start.
With that done, you need to figure if Drupal/Joomla/CMS(x) will give you all of that and with another potential unknown 5-10% feature creep. If so, you maybe better off getting in with Drupal etc.
Else, I think CodeIgniter or Symfony are great PHP frameworks to jump in with. Both offer solid tutorials, video and otherwise, and a helpful community. Kohana, which I am working on, I think you should get into if you really understand PHP and its flaws and realize that speed will be a critical factor. Those are the two big strengths that KO3 brings to the table and you should really need them to use it.
Hope this helps.
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....