Wishlist for CMS in CI.

[eluser]litzinger[/eluser]
I don't mean to take the wind out of everyone's sails, but I can't help but think this CI based CMS is a complete waste of time. Why build another CMS with CI when EE (and many other CMSs) is already out there? What do you want to do with a CMS that EE doesn't offer? Can these new features you all want be built as an extension or module to EE instead?

[eluser]Thoer[/eluser]
EE is not based on CI. It may be one time but currently it isn't.

[eluser]litzinger[/eluser]
I'm aware of that, but I still don't see the point. What do you all want to do with a CMS that EE doesn't handle? And why build a CMS on top of CI other than just because you can?

[eluser]Thoer[/eluser]
Well I'm not the one who started the thread but I would still love to see a CMS on CodeIgniter. Why? Well I think the main thing would be to have an actively developed bunch of libraries which are secure as hell, fast as lightning and can still get you a working shiny website in two hours. You'd still have to tweak it a bit probably, but that would go just like with any other CI based app (which means its still fast and secure and easy to maintain). Basicly your time would be more like get the client, get the layout done (biggest part), install, tweak it and "how's next?". Oh, and you have a satisfied customer and if you need to add something new in 2011, it's still easy because you'd have a solid base, some maintained libraries and well coded app for the rest. That would be neat.

Edit: I meant "who's next?"

[eluser]Sarfaraz Momin[/eluser]
Well to add to what Thoer has said, I am the one who has started this thread. I always belive that many minds can work far better than one and thats what open source is about. I have deployed more than 15 sites till date spanning from social networking to humor content and ecards site and games arcade as well and all of them run on a single CMS developed by me with some minor tweaks here and there for every site to work fine. I felt that the way CI is designed still requires u to have some knowledge of PHP language. Well my AIM is to have such a system which even a newbie who has referred PHP over the weekend or maybe a designer with megre or no knowledge of PHP would be able to get the site running and when the developer comes into picture he would still feel comfortable extending it as we all know how CI is. So this is the main AIM behind creating this CMS.

Please feel free to visit ignitedCMS and give your suggestions.

Good Day !!!

[eluser]litzinger[/eluser]
I wish you all the best of luck and I'll keep my eye on the project. I still haven't seen the magic bullet of CMSs b/c every project is different, though EE is the closest thing I've seen to an out of the box magic bullet. That's why I'd prefer to see a closer integration of EE and CI, but that's just me.

[eluser]Sarfaraz Momin[/eluser]
@tilzinger: Well your criticism can work in our favour. If you mean the closest than you might have certain features in your mind which you want to see in every CMS. Let us know that and we will consider them to be included or integrated into this project.

Good Day !!!

[eluser]litzinger[/eluser]
This morning I was trying to think of how this CMS would work, and what I'd like to see it do, and this is what I thought of:

Use the Matchbox library to create a separate module that will be the CMS, so going to www.mysite.com/cms/ will take you to the CMS. From there, you can add/edit/modify pages and site content and navigation in various ways and can choose a template (from the view folder in CI... no stupid template language). This CMS Matchbox module would come with an .sql file to create the tables needed to manage page content and hierarchy. You can set the URL for each page kind of like how EE handles it (mysite.com/section/page/). So this CMS would let you manage basic site pages, then you can go back to the CI application folder and create a new controller/model/view to add other sections/pages to the site that might be part of a custom application. The URLS created by the CMS would override the ones you create with your own controller (so you can't make a section called 'about' and then create an 'about_controller'). You could also create another module in Matchbox for a forum, image gallery, blog etc.

That's what I would like to see... a complete integration of CI and a CMS... not a CMS built with CI. Basically scaffolding on steroids. Otherwise you're just building another version of EE/Drupal/Joomla etc.

Is this possible and/or what is being planned?

[eluser]Majd Taby[/eluser]
To everyone, sorry for posting about this again, hope I don't offend anyone, but tilzinger, you might want to take a look at CodeExtinguisher (link in my signature), it's basically everything you explained and a bit more. It's an application you can access by changing index.php to backend.php in your url, and it helps you setup a CRUD super easily. Check out the setup video if you want.

The reason I don't tell people who want the CRUD to just use Codex, is because it is more specialized than a CMS. CodeExtingiusher s quite simply, "scaffolding on steroids".

[eluser]kilishan[/eluser]
First off, I would love to be a part of this project. I have just started working on requirements for what I would consider the ultimate CMS, and remembered seeing a few posts about CMS's here in the forums, and the search led me to this one.

I do have one comment about the way the discussion has been going so far, though. Mostly what I've seen so far is all about the code, with very little talk about what the end-user experience is. What makes this better for me to use than Joomla/Drupal/XOOPs/whatever? Personally, I think this is the route we should really look at going into this.

With that said, here's a few ideas I haven't seen done yet, that would make my life as a developer so much better, along with the reasonings. Yes, this is a long post. You've been warned.

+ Simple, process-based Site Creation. What do I mean? In most systems, you have to dive into the code to setup a template. Fine and dandy, but what about the process to get to that point? I'd love the system to allow me to create wireframe prototypes in the system itself. Using DHTML/AJAX I could drag boxes that become actual parts of the template. Then I can present this functional wireframe prototype to the client for their approval. Maybe I can even have a number of layouts to pick from as a basis (3-column fixed/liquid, 2-column, etc).

+ Live Template Development. Starting from my wireframe prototype, I can start setting background colors, font-styles, etc while I'm actually in my site. This creates the site-wide CSS files. All changes are immediately applied throughout the site. Being able to drop a mockup graphic faded in the background would be nice, too.

+ Live Editing of Everything. Or most everything, anyway. Basically in-place editing for all of the features of the page. Modules could provide small dialogs to adjust properties, etc. All based upon a standard mechanism for cohesiveness. Maybe a RAD Environment for the modules. I choose the module (say Gallery) drag it into place on the live prototype, then set a few things (like type of gallery view: list of albums, random images, etc). This creates the code that gets put in the template. It should create physical files, not just db storage, so us coders could get our hands dirty from there.

+ In-site Page Creation. Most of what is done on a website is creating pages. True, these pages have different functions, but those are elements within the page itself. I want to add a page and choose the menu it appears in within the page itself. Basically, I'm cruising through the site, realize I need a new child page, click add, and it's created based on a template I choose, and added to that pages menu, or the site's menu, or whatever. So I'm always tweaking the site as I'm using it.

+ Integrated Development/Testing/Production Environment. Let's say part of the site is live and people are using it. I'm working on new features/pages for the site in development mode. Then I want to test that page with real data, so I flick a switch and I'm in testing mode, where it uses a copy of the current production data (or a subset) and let's me see that in action. If it works, I promote it to production status with the flip of a switch. It all runs on the same server, within a single CMS.

Wow. This post is long enough, so I'll stop there and see what everyone has to say before adding any more.