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December 14, 2005

Creating a custom CMS

I've been working on a secret project for the past few months that I've told no one about, with the possible exception being Kyle. I've been looking and looking for a replacement CMS for the PC Guru Web site, but have hit a wall. The sites either don't do what I want or they lack the security I desire.

Rather than learning a new CMS and trying to write custom code for it, I began thinking about my development of the Skyman system for Skyway and how simple the process really was. All I need is a database, a Web server and a way to deliver it dynamically.

Well, I installed several CMS systems and started looking at how they create and populate their databases. There's really nothing to them, for the most part. Quite frankly, most of the platforms freely available on the net have more junk that I'd never care to use.

So what would a CMS database need? For base functionality, the following tables would be required:

• Author table
• Content table
• Category table
• RSS table

The author table would have the username and password of persons who would be authorized to post data. The content table would hold, you guessed it ... content. The category table would be used to assign content to specific areas for content tracking purposes. The RSS table would be used to pull data from RSS sources every few hours to populate on the site. Doing it this way enables your pages to load significantly faster than hot linking an RSS feed to the site.

Sure, there's alot more to it than what I've described above, but that's the base layout. From this point, it's a matter of figuring out what fields are available in each table and how those fields interact between tables. From that point, it's all taken care of in PHP, which I can code with my eyes closed.

I've been working on a new design for the Guru site as well. Keep in mind that this is in NO way completed. I'm fooling around with ideas, trying to see what works best for my concept. The layout for the new site is a rather big change from the sites I've put together in the past. Past CMS systems have had user registration and other crap that didn't really mean anything other than the ability to post in the forums. Well, I decided that if we wanted to post in the forum, why not just use a forum to do the posting in?

So, the front page of the site will be the custom CMS site that I've put together. The backend of that system will be something simple that can allow administrators to post content with minimal hassle. It will also most likely incorporate FCKeditor because that thing is just bad-ass. The user interactivity will be handled by a third-party application like phpBB, although I haven't decided as of yet if that is the direction that I want to go. But, I already have something in place if that is the way I want to go.

BTW ... on a personal note ... if you use PHPnuke and the integrated phpBB, it's a bitch to get it moved back over to a regular phpBB site.

So, anyhow ... that's my plans for the PC Gurus at the moment. Now, if I can only get some free time to work on it some more ...

~out...

Posted by ed at December 14, 2005 08:15 PM

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