Building your own CMS
This entry was posted on February 15, 2008
Building your own content management system (CMS) can be both a very tricky and a very rewarding experience. I’m in the process of building one of my own, and whilst it’s going fairly well so far, there’s still a lot of work to be done.
So how do you get started with building you own CMS?
Well, the first thing you have to do is decide exactly what you want your CMS to do. What sort of content are you going to have? Is it going to be a basic blogging script? News updates? A list of your favourite bands? Reviews of the latest films? Before you can get started on your CMS, you need to know what the “C” will be.
Once the “C” is sorted, you can start planning the “MS”. How will you store your content? Will it be in a database, or will it be in a plain ol’ text file? What sort of database will it be? What language are you strongest with? Whilst PHP / MySQL is a very common pairing to use, it is not the only option and you might like to think about that.
I find it normally helps to abandon the computer and get out a pen and paper for the next part. Make a list of everything that you need to think about when it comes to your CMS. How will you structure your database? What types of information will you be storing? The stronger you can build the back end of your CMS, the easier the front end will be.
Once you’ve decided on the structure for your database, you can set about creating the ‘install’ script which will create the tables in the database for you, and allow you to concentrate on the rest of your CMS. The biggest part will be writing all the code to put all the features you’ve decided you’re going to include into practice.
After you’ve got the back end ‘down’ for your CMS, you can start working on the front end, which is the part your visitors will see. How do you want to pull the information from the database and display it? Which information are you going to display where? How are you going to format that information? Again, this will take a large chucnk of the time.
Now that you have the back end and the front end sorted, you may think that you are done. You’re not.
Security!
The biggest weakness that many content management systems have is their security. What will you have in place to stop people hacking into your admin panel? What will you have in place to stop people deleting all the content from your database? No one knows absolutely everything there is to know about security, but there are hundreds upon hundreds of articles about it on the Internet. A bit of googling will help you identify more things you need to worry about, because, yes, you should definitely be worried.
Spam!
If your CMS has the facility for visitors to leave comments / fill in a feedback form etc., you’re going to need to worry about spam. What steps will you take to ensure it’s a human filling in a form, and not a spambot? Some spam worries come hand in hand with security worries. What’s to stop spambots using your forms to send unsolicited email to hundreds of people? Even if you deal with the security issues, spam can still be incredibly annoying! What are you going to do to stop yourself from logging into your admin panel and seeing dozens of spam comments?
Security and spam are big things to worry about, but don’t let them intimidate you too much. There are steps that can be taken to overcome the most common problems. Do not also be intimidated by the thought of building your own CMS. It can be done, and it has been done.
There are tutorials out there that will guide you through each step of a CMS and provide you with large sections of code to use. However, it’s much more rewarding and will give you a much better understanding if you do all your code yourself. Otherwise, you won’t actually be building your own CMS, you will be recreating someone else’s.
Building your own CMS is a massive task, and I’ve only skimmed the surface with this blog entry. It’s not going to be easy, but equally, it’s not going to be impossible. Be strong, do lots of research, and have fun!
14 lovely people have commented
Smile! It’s Valentine’s Day!
This entry was posted on February 14, 2008
Smiling is infection; you catch it like the flu.
When someone smiled at me today, I started smiling too.
I passed around the corner and someone saw my grin;
When he smiled I realised I’d passed it onto him!
I thought about that smile then I realised its worth;
A single smile, just like mine, could travel round the Earth.
So, if you feel a smile begin, don’t leave it undetected.
Let’s start an epidemic quick, and get the world infected!
Whether you’re single, dating, hitched, or involved in something ‘complicated’, have a happy Valentine’s Day.
(And for the record, it’s not me who wrote the above poem - I’m not that poetically talented)
7 lovely people have commented
Internet Explorer 6
This entry was posted on February 12, 2008
Millions swear by it, millions hate it. As for me, I’m somewhere in the middle. I wouldn’t say that IE6 is my favourite browser of choice, but equally I don’t think it’s as bad as some people would like me to believe. I think IE6 is a very “love / hate” type of browser, which is why it’s strange that I’m somewhere in the middle.
I’ve been using IE6 for as long as I can remember (which is quite a while when you think that IE6 has been around for many years) and it has served me well. It’s not perfect, not by a long shot, but it does what I need it to do and that’s good enough for me.
Many people ask me why I don’t upgrade to version 7. I would love to do that, but it’s not physically possible. I use a laptop and a PC. The laptop is running Windows Vista and hence has IE7 installed as standard. The PC is running Windows XP and hence has IE6 installed as standard. However, I don’t have the essential “administrator privileges” and so I can’t even alter the system tray, let alone install or upgrade a program. That’s the only reason I haven’t upgraded to version 7.
Then there’s the small matter of IE6 not always interpreting CSS as expected. Amateur web designers seem to be in two camps; one camp insist that IE6 is the spawn of Satan and will not do anything properly, and the other camp are so used to the bad habits they’ve picked up testing with IE6 that they don’t understand why standards-based browsers don’t interpret their markup properly.
For more complex designs, it is often not possible to recreate certain effects in IE6 without using massive amounts of extra markup and this can often (but not always) lead to snobbery. Some people drop support for IE6 altogether, some people display messages to their IE6-using visitors telling them to get Firefox (when there are in fact more browsers out there than just IE and FF), and some people do something that really bugs me. What really bugs me is when people brag about how “valid” and “accessible” their site is, and don’t even go to the trouble to make sure it works in IE6.
Sure, a lot of complex designs will never work in IE6, and that’s something that only Microsoft can be held responsible for, but with a bit of time and effort (which I agree is not always practical) but a lot of relatively simple problems can be fixed. IE6 interprets margins and paddings in a different way to the rest of the world (well, the world of web browsers) and this can often lead to what I call “droopy” sidebars. In a two column layout, one column will often drop down below the other. When these columns’ widths are specified in percentages, one column will often drop if the widths add up to exactly 100%. Change the total to 99%, and IE6 will stop dropping the sidebars.
IE6 is like an old acquaintance to me. I’ll be sad to see it go, but equally, the time has come for us to move forward. I don’t think there’ll ever be an answer to the whole “IE6 discussion” that I’ll 100% agree with. I do think everyone needs to move on from IE6, but I don’t think that IE6 is the worst thing ever to happen.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on IE6, be they good or bad. But, because IE6 causes such heated debate, please try and keep profanity to a minimum. IE7 still has young ears, and we can’t insult its older brother too much. Apart from that, let loose!
