CRUD - Rapyd vs CodeCrafter?

[eluser]charlieD[/eluser]
Does anyone have any experience comparing these 2 CRUD packages or any other alternatives? (I found http://www.phpguru.org/static/TableEditor.html on another thread which seems like a possible candidate.)

I need them to create admin interfaces for my clients so ideally the output would be easy to customise (rename fields to human-friendly names, hide certain fields, customise with CSS).

Rapyd seems to have a nice visual style for clients and the tinyMCE inclusion looks good for creating a CMS.

Are these any good for replacing CMSs? I find that most CMS are bloated and focus on 'articles' (i.e. large blocks of HTML) rather than key/value pairs which is what I need on most real websites.

[eluser]kucerar[/eluser]
[quote author="charlieD" date="1192304497"]Does anyone have any experience comparing these 2 CRUD packages or any other alternatives? (I found http://www.phpguru.org/static/TableEditor.html on another thread which seems like a possible candidate.)

I need them to create admin interfaces for my clients so ideally the output would be easy to customise (rename fields to human-friendly names, hide certain fields, customise with CSS).

Rapyd seems to have a nice visual style for clients and the tinyMCE inclusion looks good for creating a CMS.

Are these any good for replacing CMSs? I find that most CMS are bloated and focus on 'articles' (i.e. large blocks of HTML) rather than key/value pairs which is what I need on most real websites.[/quote]

I've had lots of experience with and modifying Achievo toolkit
http://www.achievo.org/atk

which I kind of now regret, but I can't see doing all the functionality it does in a lower level MVC framework

it gives you lots of power but carries the same frustrations of any widget library

certainly gives you enough perspective to evaluate any CRUD offering.

ATK is very good for mapping to legacy. It is essentially a giant OO christmas tree and you point the ornaments at your tables.

Had looked at Dataface, but it wasn't far enough along and only MySQL.

Have gone production with a site in ATK. You have to completely customize the views and get into modifying the framework a bit. They have a chronic problem with their views looking 3d and gaudy out of the box--lots of potential though.

-R

[eluser]phpMaster[/eluser]
[quote author="charlieD" date="1192304497"]Rapyd seems to have a nice visual style for clients
..... and the tinyMCE inclusion looks good for creating a CMS.[/quote]
My favourite addon Editor is SPAW Editor.
SPAW Editor is PHP Class.
Very easy to install and use and it is a http://sourceforge.net/ open source project.
Under constant development, growing in popularity and in number of downloads.
Currently Version 2.05 See also the SPAW support Forum.

Link: http://www.solmetra.com/en/

Maybe something for Rapyd ...

Regards

[eluser]WeeJames[/eluser]
I tried CodeCrafter once but found that it created lots of horrible code and really nasty views. Never tried Rapyd.

I found it easier just to create my own base model class that implements crud and extend that for all of my subsequent models.

[eluser]kucerar[/eluser]
SPAW looks good! A dotnet version and a PHP version, heh. I may be using it sometime soon.

http://codeigniter.com/wiki/SPAW/

Thanks :-)

[eluser]kucerar[/eluser]
[quote author="charlieD" date="1192304497"]...or any other alternatives? ...I find that most CMS are bloated and focus on 'articles' (i.e. large blocks of HTML) rather than key/value pairs which is what I need on most real websites.[/quote]

For bound wigdetry and attribute/value pairs(binding to legacy tables) there's also

http://www.phppeanuts.org/site/index.php

and

http://weblite.ca/dataface

I found neither of these compared to ATK in terms of finishedness or functionality. phpPeanuts URLs aren't any prettier than ATK's, which are admittedly ugly. ATK is unfortunately not a library but rather a monolith, to make use of it as a library, a lot of refactoring would be required to centralize the function that generated the URLs (the model for URLs will look like is a design assumption scattered throughout the code).

If you were to attempt to use CI as a front controller the URL problem is the first hurdle. What are the widgets generating for URLs and is it customizable?

-R

[eluser]charlieD[/eluser]
By key/value pairs I mean that in building most webpages on my client's sites, the pages are built up of many different parts rather than just having a block of free HTML (i.e. the CMS 'article' concept).

For example, I'd have a page with a strict template and maybe a few things that clients would want to edit:

KEY => VALUE
main image => '/images/something.jpg'
product => 'Product 1'
product => 'Product 2'
product => 'Product 3'

So, the client would fill out a form that allows them to edit the value for 'main image' then allows them to add new elements to 'product' (as many or as little as they want).

In the code, I could then have something like:

Code:

<img src="&lt;?php echo $mainImage; ?&gt;" />

<ol>
  &lt;?php foreach ($products as $p) : ?&gt;
    <li>&lt;?php echo $p; ?&gt;</li>
  &lt;?php endforeach; ?&gt;
</ol>

I don't know if any of this makes sense, but the closest thing I've found so far in what I'm looking for is the 'custom fields' in Wordpress that let you use them for almost anything to customise templates or functionality.

[eluser]kucerar[/eluser]
ah yes, ok. The Holy Grail :-) Flexible customizable framework to help build things like questionnaires and online applications (application in the sense of Application for Employment).

I wrote one. Well at least the key idea for the database design. What stopped me was lack of controller, I didn't want to write one for more than two pages. Had even sketched out a way for users to spec out a questionnaire using CSV files, import them, it generates it.

The table is of a fixed design and holds metadata, and there's only one of them per questionnaire. Was thinking I'd just as soon combine web server and database into one thing all written in C, but I don't have time for that. Maybe just combine it as a CI module.

Regarding your problem, I could see adding an image field to the metadata, would fit right in.

I'll forget my Django tinkering...perhaps this is my extract-a-framework opportunity... heh, :-) It's gonna be hard to let go of that Online Shrine Idea...

-R