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Removed Areas => Programming School => DonationCoder Projects => Topic started by: mouser on May 18, 2006, 07:52 AM

Title: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: mouser on May 18, 2006, 07:52 AM
This thread is to plan the mini-CMS features that need to be added to the site to support articles/reviews and templates, and better coding snack files, etc., as well as the amazing blogportal idea.
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: mouser on May 18, 2006, 10:23 AM
The Goal:

Requirements

Some Ideas
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: mouser on May 18, 2006, 10:49 AM
to sort of summarizing the approach i am suggesting, it basically says that we use the forum data table to hold not just posts, but blog entries, articles, download descriptions, maybe even wiki entries, (and bugtracking entries?), and then write custom code to extract and present these items in different ways in an organized website.

there are advantages and disadvantages to this of course..
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: crono on May 18, 2006, 11:26 AM
Hello Admins and Mods :)

this sounds really well, but there are some unsolved issues.
1) I keep wondering how the Pages could be integrated in the Navigation, without letting users change the Navi?

2) The Sidebars: Should a User be able to create a Sidebar for her / his own Article? Or would it be better if there are several standard sidebars, which could be inserted "context sensitiv"?

3)
  • Output should be static HTML/php pages for minimal CPU performance hit.
-mouser (May 18, 2006, 10:23 AM)
I like the semi-static PHP approach - if we have comments on the pages, it is nearly impossible to be 100% static - but 1 call to the Forums DB should be cheap.
BUT this approach makes it harder to offer full text search on the page, without having something like Apache Lucene running in the background. The Zend Framework offers a interface for Lucene, but Lucene is still needed in the backend, because Zend haven't done the indexer port to PHP now...

4)
  • Ideally it would integrate into the forum software to support searching.
-mouser (May 18, 2006, 10:23 AM)
this would solve my point above, but then it is not possible to do it "static"? Or do I miss the point?

5)
  • It must integrate into the forum to the extent that its easy for people to add comments on downloads and articles.
-mouser (May 18, 2006, 10:23 AM)
This is one method - anotherone would be to create something like a "summery" Post in the Forum for each "content" page. Then the comments can easily go to the forum (which means no spam, new members and authentication for free). Displaying on the "content" page would very easy - just pulling them out of the database.

6)
  • A generic template system that can build on demand create static HTML website hierarchy of pages from "templates" and a hierarchy of content pages.
-mouser (May 18, 2006, 10:23 AM)
Huh??? - Sorry, I don't get it...

7)
  • Such a system of being able to extract info from posts might also enable us to build a kind of "bookmarking" system where users can mark which posts threads they want to assemble on a page like a portal.
-mouser (May 18, 2006, 10:23 AM)
This would be a great feature - something like a personal portal

8)
  • A generic rebuilding-table might be kept track of so the system knows which static pages need to be rebuild when certain forum "posts" change or are added.
-mouser (May 18, 2006, 10:23 AM)
Such a table could be really painfull - and this is the BIG problem with the static approach *ImScared* - and I don't know how often we had to generate static pages - maybe we should drop the static approach and invest time on some caching strategies?


I had some (very "raw") ideas - I told mouser via PM - on how to do this CMS. In the last few hours I thought about some details. I think my approach can satisfy most of the requirements... Give me a little time (Saturday) to put it into words... :)
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: mouser on May 18, 2006, 11:36 AM
here is what i was thinking about static page rebuilding - i think you got the flavor at the end.  this is what movabletype does. it knows that when someone posts a reply, it needs to build the blog page.

a similar system could be used - all static pages that relied on a thread would have an entry on a table.  whenever a thread is modified that a static page depends on, the static page would be rebuild.

when you think of the # views vs. the number of times a new post is made, there should be no comparison in terms of cpu usage.  even if you had 1000 posts a day it would still be a big winner in terms of speed.

it's not just average speed of course - the real win comes when you get something like a digg or slashdot, because in that case you get 20,000 views and no new posts.  a static page suffers no hit at all.  a dynamic page will kill the server.

while i don't worry about this soo much with forum, i would be VERY reluctant to have a popular page of our site use such a dynamic approach.  if i am write and the blog portal idea gets popular, it will get a huge # of hits a day.
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: mouser on May 18, 2006, 12:26 PM
users need to be able to design their own sidebars.

the very best way to invision what this mini-cms has to be able to do is to look at

our reviews: https://www.donationcoder.com/Reviews/Archive/CompareTools/index.html
a user needs to be able to write such a full rich review.

a software page:
note our main software page should have their subpage with a pic:
https://www.donationcoder.com/Software/index.html
and then their page:
https://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Jibz/index.html
with subpages for their programs:
https://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Jibz/Dina/index.html

an administrator would have to "approve" adding their "section" to the download page.

someone like skrommel might not have a 2 level hierarchy and just use one level:
https://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Skrommel/

and then we have my idea of a blog portal, which is basically like a blog or lifehacker or digg page, which gets its content from the days top forum posts (as chosen by admin or otherwise).

--

i am not opposed to imposing some rather strict formatting requirements on articles/reviews/software page that goes beyond what we currently impose, but the basics are the same - users are going to want to be able to create pages with lots of pictures, and custom sidebars.

it would also be nice to have a way of creating a page like this our release page:
https://www.donationcoder.com/Software/releases.html

and i would be happy to replace the complex powerful mantis bug tracker with a much simpler integrated bug report thing where each bug report is simply a post, but again like the rest of cms idea, somehow "tagged" and able to be viewed in a specific way.

the bug tracking idea is a great example of the advantages of this forum-centric idea - because it says that each bug is a forum post.  it can be encountered by people reading the forum, but it would also have a way to "view" bugs from a different interface that would collect and present them in a different more useful task relevant way.

which is basically my idea - to add extra info to posts (tags and fields), and then have a content-template system that is capabable of collecting these posts and organizing and presenting them in a novel way that is most useful for the task.
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: mouser on May 18, 2006, 12:28 PM
same thing with blog i guess - a blog is just a post,
but with the ability maybe to say:
show me a "virtual blog" only with this person's blog posts.
or show me a "virtual blog" that contains all the blogs of all users.

these are "portal views" into the forum.

thats my new idea :)
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: mouser on May 18, 2006, 02:36 PM
Refining the proprosal -
I suggest creating a special "invisible" Board on the forum, which would be the container for what might be called "Floating Posts" or "Floating Threads" or "Tagged Threads".

Essentially this Board would not be like the other boards on the forum - you wouldn't browse it as normal.

Instead it would be used to store articles as posts,
and we would have special functions to retrieve articles and posts from that section by tags/userids/etc.

ive done a similar thing already in the programming school - where users can only read their own posts in certain sections.

NICE IDEA:
we might even NOT make this section hidden but instead label it as "My Articles" and when you click on it,
you see ONLY articles you yourself have written.
each person will see only their own articles, and be able to edit only their own articles (except for admin who can see all).

then an admin can view/edit an "article' and "promote" it to be embedded on a content page (like an article or download).
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: jgpaiva on May 18, 2006, 07:49 PM
i am not opposed to imposing some rather strict formatting requirements on articles/reviews/software page that goes beyond what we currently impose, but the basics are the same - users are going to want to be able to create pages with lots of pictures, and custom sidebars.
I'm still trying to understand some stuff on this thread, ut i think ithis is an important point.
I think that the rules for formating articles/reviews/etc ;) should be *very* strict. On one hand, this makes creativity be limited, but on the other hand, it makes the site look all the same, which is great for newcomers, because when they see the structure of one page, the rest are all alike, and also because this way, the user can make beautiful stuff without much work, because as there aren't many options, we can make all the options look good. Another important point is that, without much options, and a stricter format (maybe something using templates, a bit like the webfind template.

Just my $0.02 ;)
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: mouser on May 19, 2006, 03:32 AM
i think jgpaiva is right, and i would agree with that.
let's have a standard format and css for articles/reviews/download pages,
so that there is uniformity of appearance.

i was looking at Smarty Templates and Zend for PHP - any opinions?
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: Carol Haynes on May 19, 2006, 04:12 AM
The site I am producing stuff on for my local museum uses quite a nice format. It isn't useable here unless you want to use ASP and it may be bespoke. Basically each user (museum in this case) can login and add page sets (learning journeys in this sites case). The pages are added via a simple webform which includes fields for the main text and extra fields for links, graphics, videos, downloads etc. to be included.

The nice thing is that the main page text can be typed in manually or in any version of Word (using normal text formatting options but not graphics) and then pasted into an applet which strips out all the redundant MS tags etc. but retains text formatting. A standard template is then applied to the pages as it is added.

I'm not suggesting Word is necessarily the ideal thing to use but an editor that is cross platform and allows text formatting would be good. Pages could be edited and stored off line and then simply pasted into the standard format.

If you want to see and example of what it looks like go to http://www.mylearning.org/jpage.asp?journeyid=49&jpageid=20

Technically the site isn't live yet (you just get a holding page on the main domain page) so it is a bit rough around the edges and my pages aren't yet published (I still have to actually type a lot of them).

It is a very simple system that anyone can use and may not be too hard to develop in house so it is tailored to what you want. Plus it could then be published as a simple CMS for others to use.
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: mouser on May 19, 2006, 04:13 AM
looks interesting carol;
in this case i think we want to be more rigid about formatting.. i think.

smarty looks particularly relevant in terms of template/content processing: http://smarty.php.net/whyuse.php
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: Carol Haynes on May 19, 2006, 04:18 AM
I can't see how it could be more rigid - the contributor has very little say in how the pages are laid out - just what fonts they want to use in the text. Page layouts are identical with the exception of a few optional templates of where you put images.
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: mouser on May 19, 2006, 06:07 AM
ah i see.. i thought you were saying people could upload a ms word file, but you were saying basically you could upload a ms word file and it will strip out most stuff.
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: mouser on May 19, 2006, 06:08 AM
it's certainly an attractive site.
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: Carol Haynes on May 19, 2006, 06:41 AM
I may be naive but I think that it shouldn't be too hard to produce a CMS like this from scratch -- here are a few shots to show how it works ...

Basically each "Journey" is set up as a set of pages. In terms of what you want to do this could be analagous to a user having a set of pages or a particular section of the website (eg. Mouser's software).

The "journey" has a management page where pages can be added, edited, deleted and previewed: like this ...

[ You are not allowed to view attachments ]

Clicking Edit for a page takes you to a simple layout for the page where you fill in the details:

[ You are not allowed to view attachments ]

Notice the main text section has a [W] icon which you click to paste in Word documents from the clipboard - these are processed to retain fonts etc. but remove all pointless tags and Word metadata.

Finally the page as previewed looks like this ...

[ You are not allowed to view attachments ]

It has the advantage that it really is simple to use, it's secure because people don't need access to any web resources to use it, and in the mylearning site no pages are made 'live' until they have been checked by their admin/moderator or whatever.

From the user's point of view it is very simple - they just type a document either on screen or better in an editor and paste it in.
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: mouser on May 19, 2006, 06:48 AM
that does look nice - i like the image interface though it's a bit restrictive in terms of placemenet.

i do not think it's an altogether trivial interface you are describing, though lots of cms work very similarly.

image uploading and positioning is a bit tricky.

i'm still thinking of modifying the the forum infrastructure to provide editing and management for the articles rather than a new custom system..
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: mouser on May 19, 2006, 07:01 AM
i'm really liking the idea of using smarty..
plugins here:
http://smarty.incutio.com/?page=SmartyPlugins

include things for making thumbnails, grabbing rss feeds, etc.
seems to me this is exactly the kind of stuff i was wanting.

and we could add extenesions(plugins) to smarty for doing things like:
grabbing posts/thread contents, grabbing # of replies on a thread, grabbing attached images for a post, etc.

so that smarty could be the basis of doing the actual building of static pages from content+templates.

the idea of building static pages will also let us do some fun stuff like adding random quotes to pages, etc., without worrying about dynamic page generation costs.  i like it. the idea of statically generating pages is very appealing to me.

then on top of that we would build a system that would know how to tell smarty what to rebuild and when and where to put output (ie when certain posts change, or when an article is "published", etc.).

then there is the issue of how do users write content (articles, download pages, etc.)
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: jgpaiva on May 20, 2006, 06:59 PM
I'm still catching up on this thread, i'm just posting to report i can't see the images Carol posted.. :(
I think it might be related to permissions (because when i click them, i get the "you are not allowed here" error).
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: jgpaiva on May 20, 2006, 07:04 PM
That means, mouser that when someone made a post, that post would be processed, sent to smarty, which would generate a static page from it and store it, right?
BTW, the test forum page, as it is right now, is a dynamic page, right? (i mean because it has those toolbars that can disappear, or be collapsed)
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: mouser on May 20, 2006, 07:08 PM
the forum will not change.

the idea is that for example, we will be able to tag certain posts in the forum (like a mini-review), and say, ok make this post available as a real page on the site in section Reviews -> MiniReviews.

and then from the Reviews Page they will see a list of minireviews, including that one,
which they can read in a nicely formatted full page view with sidebar, and click to discuss it in the forum.

so the forum itself wont change, but it will allow us to build a kind of static organized web page out of the best posts.
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: Carol Haynes on May 20, 2006, 07:14 PM
I'm still catching up on this thread, i'm just posting to report i can't see the images Carol posted.. :(
I think it might be related to permissions (because when i click them, i get the "you are not allowed here" error).
-jgpaiva (May 20, 2006, 06:59 PM)

Strange - I use the inline thumbnails - I'll change them to standard pics ... have a look now.
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: jgpaiva on May 20, 2006, 07:48 PM
Strange - I use the inline thumbnails - I'll change them to standard pics ... have a look now.
Nope.. Still not working. I have some strange privilegies in this section, i can view the posts, but i can't search, see images, or even use the quote button.. It's a bit weird.

@mouser: Ok.. Now i get the idea. This sure looks interesting! That means that the thread-opening posts at the mini-reviews section would be limited in look, so that it fits the review pattern, or with smarty there's no need for that?
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: mouser on May 20, 2006, 07:54 PM
try now jgpaiva, see if i fixed the issue.
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: jgpaiva on May 21, 2006, 05:51 AM
Great, mouser, now i even see the posts on the recent posts section! Thanks!  :Thmbsup:
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: jgpaiva on May 21, 2006, 05:56 AM
Ok, now i can comment on the images: THOSE LOOK GOOD!
EhEh... Very nice, i like the idea! I already tried finding something similar, because it's hard to make good looking posts only with bbcode. As for images, why not mantaining the system we have right now? The [ You are not allowed to view attachments ] is easy to use, and allows for (almost) exact placement of images.
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: jgpaiva on May 21, 2006, 07:07 AM
Ok, i was thinking... If we pick a post from the forum, and blog it, wouldn't it appear out of context? How could this be solved?
I think that when something was blogged, that something should have an additional comment from the blogger. Or is there a better solution? (or am i missing the point, here? ;) )
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: mouser on May 21, 2006, 07:11 AM
I think that when something was blogged, that something should have an additional comment from the blogger

this is an interesting point -
if you are always embeddeding/extracted (blogged) the first post of a thread then i don't think it will be a problem.. but if you were grabbing posts from the middle of a thread it might require something else..

but there are other issues like a long post should only display an intro text and say "click for more" maybe..
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: Carol Haynes on May 21, 2006, 08:02 AM
How about including blog tags in the forum? Something like:

[Select]
[BLOG]
Blog text

[/BLOG]

Which when display shows the first 5 lines with a Read more button?

This could probably be easily acheived by modifying the SPOILER code or to be honest there is nothing to stop using SPOILER anyway.

[Select]
Intro Para

[SPOILER=Read More ...]
Rest of text
[/SPOILER]
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: mouser on May 21, 2006, 08:11 AM
i was thinking something similar actually..
the only thing we have to figure out is.. often the person posting wont be the person adding the entry to the blog page.

so a moderator or admin might "promot" a post to the blog view, not the original author.

so in this case there are 2 choices:
1) have admin edit the post to add special intro tags (downside = admin has to edit post and it shows up as edited by ..)
2) when admin says to blog a post, simply COPY the post rather than linking to it, then admin can choose what text to leave out.  advantage is it lets admin cutomize the blog posts a bit if it needs to be (edit title, text, pic).  i think this might be the way to go.
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: Carol Haynes on May 21, 2006, 08:18 AM
How about having a "Proposed BLOG" section - then any editing can be done by the original poster and a mod/admin by agreement, once it is in final form the initial post can be moved to the live BLOGS area where the initial post is protected and others can post responses.

In the "Proposed BLOG" section there could be a sticky guidance article to get a uniform look and feel.

Suitable posts (by agreement with the author) could be copied to the "Proposed BLOG" section for tweaking etc.

Could you use a static page to point to new BLOGs with the brief extract automatically?

Could this actually be a possible overall solution - use the Forum as the main area for content as well as the forum (hiding areas from forum posts if necessary) and using a few static pages to grab relevant content to point to the appropriate forum pages?
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: Carol Haynes on May 21, 2006, 08:22 AM
One other thought - is it possible in SMF to apply different templates to some forums - or are there any mods that might do that? That way specific areas could be given their own look?
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: mouser on May 21, 2006, 08:23 AM
thats an interesting idea carol. there is no way to do that built in, but it probably wouldnt be too hard to modify..
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: jgpaiva on May 21, 2006, 09:09 AM
I like the [blog][/blog] tag idea. The blogger could make a post on the same thread, with that tag, where he would quote the other post.
Another advantage about this is that the same thread that had the blogged post will also have the blog entry, which makes the comments for both the post and blog entry be at the same place (which i consider fulcral, to avoid having the same information in 2 different places), and also because it'll be easier to see the blog entry when browsing the forum, because it'd be like a regular post.

I also think what you mentioned, mouser, is important, cutting long posts should be done, to avoid having big blog entries.

Another good thing about the [blog] tag is that (i think) it would make it easier to add new bloggers, because it wouldn't imply having to modify posts.
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: mouser on May 21, 2006, 09:28 AM
im not sure i understand what you are saying jgpaiva;
as i understand the [blog] tag idea it's more like this:

blog entries and articles will be made from posts (you dont need to add the [blog] tags for that).
the only issue is that you could allow people to indicate which parts of their post should be extracted and displayed in the blogs or article intro.  at least that is my idea.

a better term would be [intro] [/intro] which you could use to indicate which short text to use as an intro.
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: Carol Haynes on May 21, 2006, 09:53 AM
That's why I thought SPOILER could do the work now ...

An new blog post woul look like this:

This is my introduction to my blog post

Read more ...
This is the rest of my blog post

Perhaps the BLOG tag could use the existing spoiler code to do this but modified so that:

1) When you hit button the button is removed or changed to "Hide again ..."
2) The text is expanded within the thread as for spoiler but not in its own box just as part of the whole message

You could always have a set of BLOG tags so that you can set up standard formatting ...

eg.

[Select]
[BLOGTITLE]A New Blog[/BLOGTITLE]
[BLOGINTRO]This is my introduction to my blog post[/BLOGINTRO]
[BLOGSUBHEADING]Section 1[/BLOGSUBHEADING]
[BLOG]This is the full text of section 1 of my blog[/BLOG]
[BLOGSUBHEADING]Section 2[/BLOGSUBHEADING]
[BLOG]This is the full text of section 2 of my blog[/BLOG]

Each BLOG /BLOG pair wouldbe displayed as a "Read more ..." as above in the Spoiler example button but Titles, intros and section headings would be displayed.

Each of these tags would have a font style, colour etc. associated with it as the default (obviously they could be overridden easily within the text body in the usual way).
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: jgpaiva on May 21, 2006, 10:08 AM
eheh... As always, i missunderstood stuff.
I thought you had mentioned that the forum would make a blog entry from a post. I mean, every post that had the [blog] tag would be copied to the blog. ;)
I mean, each blog entry would also be a post on the forum.
I completelly misunderstood the idea :S

I also like the idea carol presented in her last post, having the (read more) button that would disappear and show the whole post (on the blog)
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: mouser on May 21, 2006, 10:12 AM
i think a spoiler like button that says read more instantly makes a lot of sense.

each blog entry WILL be a post on the forum,
but users wont just be able to put a [blog] tag in their post to make that happen.
only a moderator will be able to be able to promote a post to a blog/frontpage entry.
and only a moderator will have final say about what introductory text from the post should go on the blog page.
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: Carol Haynes on May 21, 2006, 10:45 AM
I can't see a problem with letting people use the blog tags in their own posts, or edit them accordingly at the request of a mod.

Once a post is considered suitable and edited into a consistent format it could be promoted to full blog status and would have an intro on the blogg main page.

If someone wants to write a significant piece outside the normal forum it could submitted in a separate forum section.

A simple way to acheive the blog main page would be to use something like eg. WordPress (or similar Blog) to act as a dumb frontend for the blog posts. It would then only need moderators (or whoever else you want to invlove) to have access to the frontend to copy summaried to Wordpress and add a link to the main SMF forum post where the blog is stored. That way it wouldn't require any sort of integration of Wordpress with SMF, just use WordPress as a quick way to get a frontpage up that is easy to use.

You could of course use any Blog type setup to acheive this, WordPress is just an example and maybe an overkill.

You could even use the "Blogger" website and have an extra point of entry into DonationCoder.com and then there would be no setting up work to do!
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: jgpaiva on May 21, 2006, 12:46 PM
That means that a user would put the [blog] tag on his post, but it might not get blogged?
I think i still don't get the idea...
Ok, this was non-sense, i misread it all. I think now i understand the idea, please proceed with the brain-storming ;)
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: mouser on June 11, 2006, 09:18 AM
there must be a php coder here who is interested in a medium scale serious project like this?
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: Rover on June 12, 2006, 06:29 PM
Conceptually, this is just a PHP wrapper around a directory structure, right?  The pain in the neck about writing a CMS is the User Interface stuff.  (At least to me it is)

From what I recall, you're proposing something like this:

A directory structure.....
/www/dc.com/html/mainsite/pages of stuff
/www/dc.com/html/non-published/pages of stuff
/www/dc.com/html/includes/ header, footer, css, images, etc.
/www/dc.com/html/admin/ admin programs to promote content, preview it, etc.

with a control php script to read and display requested pages, but not unpublished or removed pages.  Something like:
/www/dc.com/html/pager.php?page=/reviews/av-2006-04-01.php
That would read all of the mainsite directories and pages to create a link panel plus display the requested page.  Is that about right?

If you can live without WYSIWYG page creation, this should not be incredibly difficult....for someone else :)

Seriously, is this the concept?

Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: mouser on June 13, 2006, 02:19 AM
this is very close to the concept, and you've grasped the main idea.

to be more specific, the idea is to have:
1) a Content Directory Tree, which is someplace not in public_html
2) a set of Template and Site Building instructions, again not in public_html
3) a tool for BUILDING (regenerating) the html site from the content+templates

so it wouldnt be a dynamically generated "wrapper" but rather a way of building static html (or php) pages on demand when they need updating, from a set of content pages and templates.

so for example if you changed the header/banner, you could say "rebuild the entire website now" and it would rebuild all the static pages with the new header, footer, etc.

in more advanced cases, you could say, this page should contain the text of these posts; so when one of these posts change, this page needs to be rebuilt. so there has to be a kind of table telling it what needs rebuilding and when.

the tool also needs to provide some nice functions for things like a navigation bar/menu (which means it has to scan the directories and discover the tree structure of the site from the content directory, and then make this into a nice menu system).  but yes the key idea is that the content directory tree IS the site layout.

the advantages are:
the final result is superfast static pages.
the content pages are all outside the public_html directory and can be made safe (ie you can dissallow php,etc), which means its easy to give random people ftp access to "their section" of content.
it lets you write page content easily by hand in flat files
it still allows for the possibility of a more sophisticated wsywig/gui/usermanagement cms front end to be layered on top, creating content pages in the content directory (as you mention above), thought this is not my immediate concern.
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: webrunner on June 15, 2006, 12:51 PM
Excuse me, but why not choose a standard CMS in stead of reinventing the wheel?
I am currently looking into CmsMadeSimple, wich is very nice and has great features.

Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: mouser on June 15, 2006, 01:43 PM
i've looked at CmsMadeSimple, and nearly every cms i can find.. so many my head is spinning.

i've tried hard to find an existing cms that i thought would work for us, and have come to the conclusion that the best thing is for us to design our own mini one.

some primary things that rule out most cms:
1) we want it tightly integrated with the forum login info
2) we want it to use flat files
3) we want the generated pages to be pure html and not make the entire site a php based dynamic page generation thing (almost every cms on planet fails here; only moveabletype adopts this rebuilding of static pages approach).  this is desired to reduce cpu load.
4) our expectation is that most of the articles and posts and blogs will be generated from actual forum posts - so that demands a custom approach.

it's been a real struggle trying to figure out the tradeoffs between using an existing cms and embarking on our own.  i don't take such a decision lightly and i would rather find one existing one that suits us - but in this case i don't think we need a lot of the heavy cms stuff and i think the existing cms systems don't quite match our needs so.. i think its a custom one for us..
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: mouser on July 01, 2006, 11:22 PM
nice discussion of push+pull cms strategies:
http://www.gadgetopia.com/post/5385
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: Rover on July 07, 2006, 10:00 PM
@Mouser - Can you (or one of your minions) mock up a user interface for this? 

The actual make-the-site-from-the-templates-and-content part of this seems pretty straight forward.  The tricky bits will be what you expect users to see and do.  I think it would be beneficial to mock up a few parts of the UI for a couple of reasons:
1) It would help us define some of the details
2) It might help us group some components and distribute them among developers.

 :two:
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: mouser on July 07, 2006, 10:34 PM
yeah i can try.
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: jeremejazz on October 18, 2010, 07:04 AM
cool  ;D

I hope I could join you.. I just need to catch up with PHP's  features ...
Title: Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion
Post by: Deozaan on October 18, 2010, 12:09 PM
Hi Jereme, and anyone else wondering: This thread died off 4 years ago in 2006. Be sure to look at the dates of posts to see if they're still relevant. :Thmbsup: