Why don't we build a great CMS from Codeigniter ?

[eluser]John Fuller[/eluser]
Building an open source community CMS from CodeIgniter is not necessarily a bad idea, but if that is what you want to do then you just need to do it. You don't need us to sign off on the idea or even help out. You will have a lot more clout with the idea if you back up your words with real work rather than saying lets do it and then disappearing.

Can I ask if this is why you like CI - because coding with it is more verbose than, say, Rails or Cake, but it is good you can specify everything yourself?

I am a full time web developer and I got my start from the Ellislab community. Pretty much all I know about PHP and HTML/CSS has come from hacking away on an Ellislab creation (all the way back from their first CMS which was pMachine.) Currently the majority of my work is also found through the Ellislab community channels. I think that is plenty reason to stick with Ellislab.

Other than the above reasons, CI is also PHP which is why I don't use Rails or Django. Rails has really great ideas though and I think learning other languages (and their frameworks) is beneficial to web developers. As you pick up other ways of doing things your programming skills get stronger. When things settle down I will probably start doing Ruby or Python work on the side. I probably won't any time soon mess with the other PHP frameworks other than Zend. There just appears to be too much fluff with Cake and Symphony.

[eluser]Unknown[/eluser]
I too am interested in developing a CMS using CI. I agree that a CMS isn't a solution that fits all projects, however I am particularly interested in some sort of page manager where pages/folders can be easily created by non technicals using a WYSIWYG editor. Some kind of versioning and workflow (editors, publishers etc.) would be great.

I currently can't think of the best way of achieving this, as say if pages are being "published" out form the CMS how would you prevent CI from interpreting the URL as a controller without creating hundreds of exceptions in a htaccess file?

Should anyone get something off the ground then I would be interested in getting involved.

[eluser]adamp1[/eluser]
A CMS would be nice to see, but I don't think its what CI needs. I know for myself I use a lot of things over and over again so am developing a framework to sit on top of CI which gives me useful always needed features, but which can be easily extended. This way I can get the basics of the site done in a flash and concentrate on the custom work.

[eluser]Référencement Google[/eluser]
Just for my 2 cents, the problem is that everybody has different kind of needs.
I have been looking at Expression engines, but it does not suit my needs, even if it's a lot flexible I don't find myself in the structure concept it have.

But when I see questions like "Why don’t we build a great CMS from Codeigniter ?" I think: No, it's not a good idea because it won't fit everybody's need. But, what I think could be a good idea, would be to have tools that can make everybody's life easier to build one. I think for example:

- An awesome and official CRUD library
- User auth, member managements libs
- A "page" management lib, for example that will manage content pages over a Database
- etc...

I know all this libs exist over the community, but what would be maybe good is to bring things together, and have then a package like "CI CMS Builder"

[eluser]Elliot Haughin[/eluser]
if a cms was flexible enough to let you build your own modules, or easily customize it, then it would be great... You'd essentially be creating a bare cns with basic functionality like pages, blog/news, account... And that's it... Then you have the ability to write your own modules and make them as bespoke as you like.

[eluser]m4rw3r[/eluser]
I'm also making a CMS on top of CodeIgniter.
It is currently capable of handling customized pages in a tree structure, with an extendable page class (every page is an object extending the base page class) and a plugin system (not finished) which will enable users to add their own template tags, admin menues, behaviours for pages and so on.
I have made a port of the radius template engine to php (and it is working very well), and used Radiant CMS as primary source of inspiration.
If anyone has suggestions of how customizable a good CMS should be, I will be glad to hear.

[eluser]maadmac[/eluser]
[quote author="my_immortal" date="1203194762"]
But it's not open source like joomla and others.
[/quote]

What difference does this make? It's pure PHP, you can modify and hack it as much as you want -- there are tons of 3rd party modules and plugins for ExpressionEngine now. The only thing you couldn't do is turn around and sell it (the total package, that is, not the plugins -- some people are making a good living selling EE plugins). But how many people expect to do that? I don't see terribly many Joomla/Drupal/Mambo-based custom systems available for sale anywhere...

EE is free for personal use; if you use it for client work (like we do), then you roll the cost into the budget ($200 is negligible for most clients), so you don't end up paying for it anyway. But you do get support for your purchase price, and that money goes toward maintaining a great company's commitment to great software.

I suspect Mr Fuller has the way of it. Most of us here are full-time developers; we're not in the business of developing or maintaining a CMS -- plus, CI is so flexible, you can create your own on a per-project basis anyway.

Not that I don't think it wouldn't be great to see a CMS based on CodeIgniter, or want to discourage people who want to develop one, but other than as a coding exercise (or just for fun), what's the point?

[eluser]Lone[/eluser]
I thought that I might as well jump in on this one as well seeming we are 80% of the way building our own CMS.

There is a lot of pros and cons to making a a community driven CMS from CI but I feel that as mentioned a few times that there are enough CMS's out there and even some of them (Joomla 1.5 from memory) support MVC structure which is the true great about CI.

But the building of a CMS is truly (IMO) a personal thing - we have certain philosophies in how a CMS should be structured based on our previous client needs and experiences and I know that these thoughts are not in line with others. And this is why we would not release ours to public as it suits our needs and no need for expansion except where we see fit or suggested by clients. We will be though endeavoring to release certain libraries and classes to the community as we love to contribute back where possible.


Again, I don't want to discourage the happening of this happening but my biggest suggestion would be to make this CMS simple simple simple. You don't want to be supporting a whole community of people who just want to get it, install it and complain about a lack of features and demand more without contributing.

Overall, I think that any CI CMS should be built for developers like everyone else on here as a starting base only to help guide people what way to develop their system.


Also for those interested here is how our admin panel is looking at the moment

[eluser]Negligence[/eluser]
Just out of curiosity, why would you (or other developers) spend your time building a CMS when there are hundreds already out there?

I just don't get it how new developer think it's fashionable to build a CMS. Why not spend your time on something more productive, useful, and potentially marketable? I haven't touched a CMS in years, but even then the market was flooded.

It just makes more sense to develop something unique, rather than waste your time doing something that was done thousands of times before you.

[eluser]Lone[/eluser]
For us its for three main reasons:

1. Flexibility - We build the CMS and tailor it to suit our requirements. It allows us to have a CMS that doesn't have any features we/our clients don't need (bloat and wasted resrouces) and also allows us to expand it when required without the need of hacking someone elses core code (like Joomla) and loosing any support/assistance from that CMS.

2. Support - This more or less applies to open source CMS's where support can be hard to come by, especially for additional components/modules. I don't like selling a client a product that we haven't been able to fully test or be involved in the production of because when things go wrong it reflects on us regardless of who did the code. At least with our own work we can do our own fixes when required bu more importantly we fully test all of our code (no matter how painful it can be!) before releasing it to clients.

3. Cost - I am not always an entirely money driven person, meaning one that is one that just tries to cut corners to save money. But when it comes to a good CMS it does cost money eg. EE. Our client base is forever growing and everytime we pay for a license it is time that we could be spending building our own CMS. We have the resources, knowledge and experience to build our own CMS and when you factor the costs on our end to build one compared to purchasing quite a few licenses (say 20 over a year) in one year then doing it ourself easily outweighs purchasing multiple licenses. Especially when factoring in the other two above advantages to us.