From the "Braindump" section over on DevShed today there's a new article sharing some helpful hints on picking out that right Open Source content management system that you need for the job.
A Content Management System (CMS) provides a straightforward way to maintain a web site, allowing site owners to include interactive features such as article publishing, file uploads and sharing, forums and blogs with a minimum of coding. And a good CMS will also allow extensive customization to the site's layout and appearance, so it doesn't end up looking like thousands of other sites built on top of the same code base.
The look at a few of the priorities to consider - multi-author support, metadata management, ease of use - as well as technology and business considerations. Systems they look at in their overview include Joomla, Drupal, Mabo and Plone.
Ian Selby has posted a look at the newly released PHP support by the Aptana software:
Aptana (yes, this is a shameless plug) released version 1.0 of its PHP support yesterday, and it is something that you should definitely check out. Prior to working at Aptana, I was an avid user of Zend Studio, and Coda, simply because those were the best PHP IDEs as far as I was concerned. Over the past few months, however, we've been hard at work on the PHP support for Aptana Studio, and I can say with much confidence that it is in every way as good as every other PHP IDE out there, and better than some in other respects.
He talks about new features like content assist (adding userland code to the automatic completion), completion of functions with parameters already filled in and a PHP preview server and debugger built right in. You can get more information on the Aptana website.
Footers are often an overlooked aspect of designing a site - when they can actually be kinda handy and informative. In this tutorial we'll go through some options you can have for your WordPress site.
They take different bits of information - archived posts, the "about" message and some links - and arrange them in a sidebar sort of format. This is then styled to work more like a footer, moving it down to the bottom of the page and laid out horizontally. The complete code for the tutorial can be dropped easily into the wp-content folder (named "WPFooter").
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.
Jani Hartikainen has posted a quick tip for Zend Framework users out there looking to force a download from their script.
"How do I make a file downloadable through my script?" This seems to be a relatively common question on #zftalk nowadays, so here's a quick wrapup!
He compares the two ways - the usual PHP-only way of using header() calls and echoing out the file versus the more Zend Framework way - using a Response object to pull in the content, set the headers and a helper to display/render the data output.
DevShed has finished off its CodeIgniter series today with this ninth part focusing on making a simple content management system with the framework.
Designed to allow programmers to create applications rapidly by utilizing the Model-View-Controller pattern, the Code Igniter framework lets you add many capabilities quickly and easily. This article will bring everything we've learned together for the creation of a content management system.
Their system combines the bits of knowledge from the previous parts (segments of specific functionality) and combining them into a MySQL-driven system to store some information about the user's favorite movies.
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.
In a recent blog postGaylord Aulke illustrated a method for dumping the (key) content from a memcached cache in a friendly, formatted way.
When i did some optimization of a cluster based webapp lately, I was wondering how Memcache was speading my cache entries over the cluster. So i did some research for monitoring tools. [...] Inspired by [memcache.php], i wrote a small script that fetches all data from a memcache cluster, gets all keys out of it and then sorts and displays them in a list. Yes it it ugly and yes: the memcacheD is not answering other requests while doing a cachedump.
He includes the 22 line script in the post to spit back the data in a simple array. From there it can be styled whoever you'd like.
DevShed continues its look at sending MIME emails with PHP in the fourth part of the series - a method for sending HTML in the message.
In this article, I'm going to show you how to provide the MIME mailer class with the ability to send email messages in HTML format. This will greatly extend its functionality, so don't miss this tutorial.
They start by reviewing the class they've created so far, including an example of its use. From there they modify it slightly to make it easy to embed the HTML content into the email by adding the addHTML and buildHTMLPart methods.
On the Paranoid Engineering blog, there's a recent post with a "CMS battle" of sorts between two of the more popular PHP-based content management systems out there - Drupal and Joomla.
It's hard to choose which one to use without trying them out. As usually, there are more options - home grown custom programming or even building your own CMS (which I was once stupid enough to do). Programming from scratch is always fun and beneficial for your skills, however, if you need things up and running in no time or you don't do (or don't want to do) any programming, using a CMS is the way to go.
His vote is for Drupal but he's included a long list of specs comparing the features of both so you can decide for yourself on which is the better fit.
