Mike Lively has a new review of a book from Packt Publshing (authored by Martin Brampton) - PHP5 CMS Framework Development.
Upon reading through the book I have found that it gives an excellent case study of Martin Brampton's approach to CMS design and implementation. [...] One might be concerned that the ideas in this book are slanted towards how Brampton decided to implement various aspects of Aliro. While it is true that much of the book uses code directly out of Aliro, I feel that he did take the time to make sure he explained the reasons for the design and development decisions he made.
The more he read through the book, the more Mike felt like it was a case study of the Aliro CMS rather than a true look at CMS building in PHP5. He (Mike) lays out some of the contents of the book including the look at common CMS functionality, code organization, extensions and internationalization.
Douglas Clifton has put together a series of blog posts looking at several different types of categories that PHP applications and tools can fit into:
Rather than spending the time and effort to implement paging, I took another approach. And that was to get down to specifics. This was really a taxonomy problem, and the key was to break the page up into a top-level (general) category, and then divide the rest into sub-categories.
In an excerpt from this book from Packt Publishing, Martin Brampton look sat access control for content management systems and considerations that need to be made to make it effective.
Now we have some ideas about database, we quickly run into another requirement. Many websites will want to control who has access to what. Once embarked on this route, it turns out there are many situations where access control is appropriate, and they can easily become very complex. In this chapter we look at the most highly regarded model'"role-based access control'"and find ways to implement it. The aim is to achieve a flexible and efficient implementation that can be exploited by increasingly sophisticated software.
He looks a the different kinds of access control (discretionary access control, mandatory access control) and topics surrounding them like:
Adding Hierarchy
Avoiding Unnecessary Restrictions
Special Roles
Implementation Efficiency
Real Difficulties
The tutorial finishes up with the start of a hierarchical access control system (including a few screenshots showing the tables and their relationships).
On the Ibuildings blog today Marcello Duarte has a new review of the Packt Publishing book "PHP5 CMS Framework Development" (by Martin Brampton).
Martin left Mambo (before they announced to drop support for PHP4 last September) to write his own CMS and "evolve out of the Mambo history", by taking advantage of PHP5 OO enhancements. The result is Aliro: a CMS, a framework and an extension project with traits and genes of the Mambo family. Aliro code is used throughout the book to support and illustrate his presentation.
Topics of the different chapters include basic CMS system needs, organizing code, extensions and editing and presenting content.
He includes some of the criteria he'll be using to judge based on including the list of features it includes, how quality is the code, what sort of state the documentation is in and how much of a community it has around it.
On the KillerPHP blog Stefan Mischookshares a sample chapter from a recent PHP-related book published by Packt, "PHP 5 CMS Framework Development":
The people at Packt Publishing just sent me a free sample chapter (in PDF format) of their latest PHP book (PHP5 CMS Framework Development) for me to pass on to you guys.
The sample chapter looks at access control in a CMS application. Stefan also includes a brief outline of the contents of the remainder of the book. Other chapters cover topics like decreasing code bloat, security, specialized handlers and localization.
A recent post from Francois Zaninotto has been getting a lot of attention recently. It's his look at what would be needed to design a complete CMS and the full architecture behind it.
When faced with the alternative between an off-the-shelf CMS or a custom development, many companies pick solutions like ezPublish or Drupal. In addition to being free, these CMS seem to fulfill all possible requirements. But while choosing an open-source solution is a great idea, going for a full-featured CMS may prove more expensive than designing and developing your own Custom Management System.
He breaks it up into sections that look at the hidden costs behind custom development, what components it takes, the environment to build in and some of the fundamental questions you need to ask before even getting started.
A new post on the Debuggable blog spotlights a content management system built on top of the framework - Wildflower.
There are hundreds of PHP Content Management Systems. Why would a decently earning freelancer, hacking Wordpress to fit any clients need decide to write one from scratch? The reason is CakePHP. [...] So what does a programmer do when he's not comfortable with the tool he uses? He programs a new one. It's slightly more than a year that I started a project called Wildflower. The tag line is A CakePHP CMS.
The article talks about what comes built into the CMS, includes some screenshots of it at work and talks some about the roadmap for the future of the project.
On the PHPClasses.org website there's a new book review posted from Alexandre Altair de Melo about a new book from Packt Publishing - "PHP 5 CMS Framework Development" (by Martin Brampton).
Often developers have to think about several aspects of the architecture of a system for the Web, not necessarily restricted to requirements of the software. With this in mind the book "PHP 5 CMS - Framework Development" is very rewarding reading.
Alexandretalks about the author of the book, the wide range of topics discussed in it (some not just applying to CMSes) and a breakdown of the contents of each chapter.
It is great work from the book author and the publisher, as we now have another great title, not only about PHP, but also about designing an architecture for software not just for only for creating content management systems.
