Zend CMS

So it’s been some time since I posted an article which I promised myself I would not neglect this site as I’ve done in the past. Truth be told I’ve been swamped by some very large projects involving the evolution of my zend framework platform (notice its no longer referred to as a skeleton). I will be continuing my series of articles on the Zend Framework however some things have changed as my own methodology has evolved. I’m hoping to feature an article on View Helpers soon which I’ve discovered is very much like crack cocaine… I can’t find situations where they’re ‘not’ useful. More to come on that.

Meanwhile, my nifty platform has evolved into a full blow Content Management System which I would like to feature in future articles. For now I will simply preface it with a brief description and a wish list of features I’m hoping i’ll have time to implement. Eventually I will release this monstrosity into the wild to let the community have at it.

When I started working for eROI, it was customary to use CMSMS (CMS Made Simple) for the majority of the websites and custom php would be shoe-horned in using subfolders and mod_rewrite trickery. I have nothing against CMSMS and I spent very little time dabbling with its administrative interface but I knew immediately it was not to be my tool when I started developing with the Zend Framework. The two were like oil and water and it simply required too many brain cycle-hours to come up with a way to have a zend application co-exist with the cms. Thus my platform was born. The first incarnation which was used in a fairly large project could barely be called a CMS as all it did was manage static blocks of html and links. To be honest I don’t think I fully understand what a CMS did until after that project was over.

The next project came and I knew it was time to add features so without borning everyone with the details, through the course of the next project which as of yet is in its final stages of development (I will disclose after the site launch), my CMS became a living entity. In the previous project, templates were individual files to had to be edited within the file system and within the strict directory structure of my application skeleton. While the whole collaboration process with an html developer proved extremely educational, I must admit I will never develop an application that way ever again even though I used what I considered to be best practices. The new way became a fully live system where editing is done through the web and the poor unsuspecting web developers have no concept of php, zend, or any part of the applications architecture. Development is visualized and managed through pages, content blocks, layouts, menus, etc.

My goal is develop this system into a cutting edge web application platform built on top of the Zend Framework. I would like to incorporate features from many well respected CMS solutions such as the Expression Engine, Plone, Joomla, Drupal, etc so I have been listening to other web developers very closely. More to come on this so stay tuned.