Comments on: The Perfect CMS

By: Alan Hogan

Alan Hogan — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 15:47:39 +0000

Oops: The link to HoganSystem (which is not up yet) got eaten. I'd sandwiched it in angle brackets. It's at HoganSystem.com. Feel free to delete this comment, Mike, and fix the original (the like was here: "should be at LINK by late January ...")

By: Alan Hogan

Alan Hogan — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 15:45:10 +0000

What a great idea. I haven’t head anyone describe the problem with all these CMSes in quite this way. You’re absolutely right, of course. In the past, I have written about the ideal CMS myself, but overlooked the concept of pluggability or easy integration/cohesion.

I’m actually in the process of writing my own PHP CMS (should be at by late January 2008) and my own mini image upload/edit/batch processor/resizer/thumbnailer/gallery script (http://darkboom.com/). I’ll keep these ideas in mind. Darkboom, especially, has already been conceptualized and partially implemented as a very pluggable app; it should nest right inside your existing CMS and, with just a few lines of custom “bridge”-like scripting, will allow your CMS to decide whether or not users are logged in and able to use it. HoganSystem CMS (HS-CMS, I call it), the content management system I am writing, is actually built with a limited bridge-like functionality; it doesn’t sync tables or anything (very cool idea, Mike), but will actually accept entries (url, description, categories/tags) of pages it does not generate, just to make the whole site more cohesive.

I’ve promised to make Darkboom free (at least for personal use and probably for all uses) and I have not decided how to release HoganSystem CMS. If you have any comments or questions, get at me

BTW I love that you use Markdown for comments. I just discovered PHP Markdown and it makes writing for the Web so much easier.

By: Mark Dodwell

Mark Dodwell — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 01:24:31 +0000

I’m building a Web 2.0 CMS aimed at small web design companies. Please help to get this how you need it, by telling me what you would like to see. Visit the blog now at http://mkdynamic.wordpress.com/2006/08/18/the-perfect-cms-web-20/trackback/

By: Mike Purvis

Mike Purvis — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 20:44:25 +0000

As soon as you get into modding phpBB (preventing user profile changes), you’ve broken the upgradability, though. You can use the template to remove all links to “profile.php”, but that, to me, seems like cheating…

As I’ve begun tear into the MediaWiki source, I’ve been interested to note that their user-authorization system is *deliberately* designed to be easily pointed to different tables/cookies/schemes. They realise that a wiki is something typically tacked onto an existing site with an existing users table.

On [our site](http://newtron.uwmike.com/), the forum tables are king. Coppermine has been modded for phpBB, and it’s a custom hacked-together script that pulls posts to create the front page announcements.

By: David Smith

David Smith — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 16:32:27 +0000

I built a website for the Conrad Grebel student council, that incorporates content management and we added a forum system to it for discussions, etc. I choose to with phpBB based on what I had heard from other users.

It was simple to set up, I created templates to handle the look and feel, and since I had written the CMS myself, creating the “bridge” between phpBB and the CMS user tables was easy. The user does not update their e-mail or password in the forum area, but instead updates it through the global site preferences.

Right now I’m working on rewriting the user management section of the CMS, to make it more flexible. Thanks for the thoughts. I’m going to try and make a more flexible bridge that would appear to be more transparent.