I have to build a administration site for my association, and I was in doubt between choosing joomla or concrete 5 for it.
In the specific I need to have administrators that can watch the data and users who must be able to modify database data. The data of course is user specific.
Which solution could be better for my needs?
Does this site only handle this data task? Or is it a "normal" website with lots of content, and this data function is only one part of that?
If the website isn't primarily page- and content-focused, then you don't want to use a CMS at all -- you'd be better served by one of the frameworks (in php, try CodeIgniter, or if you're a more advanced programmer try Symfony or Kohana).
But if you do have a website that has lots of pages and content, and this data function is only one part of it, well then it really depends on what you're familiar with already. Are you currently experienced in either Joomla or Concrete5? If so, stick with what you know (unless you're looking for an excuse to learn a new system, in which case by all means use the one you don't know). I personally think Concrete5 is vastly superior to work with, both because it "stays out of your way" as a developer and lets you code your custom functionality up any way you want (check out the "single_page" functionality, which is what you'd want for this project), and also because it provides a much more intuitive editing interface for the users of the site. Concrete5 is one of the newer php CMS's, so I believe it has the benefit of "learning from the mistakes" of earlier systems like Joomla, Drupal, etc. But on the other hand, because the older systems (like Joomla) have been around longer, there is a lot more documentation, books, forums, etc. available.
Best of luck.
Related
I am a front-end developer who has worked with Ruby on Rails for 5+ years. Currently considering a job at a company that uses Magento (2). I know little about Magento, but i am getting the feeling by reading about it that it relies heavily on third-party stuff (themes etc). I am a strong believer of separation of concerns (back-end logic decoupled from front-end) and have a healthy aversion against third-party things like frameworks (always hated Bootstrap). Would i be happy working with Magento? Opinions and insight are heavily appreciated!
Currently considering a job at a company that uses Magento (2). I know little about Magento, but i am getting the feeling by reading about it that it relies heavily on third-party stuff (themes etc).
It's going to depend entirely on the agency you work for and what it is they do. You'll either hate it, or be mostly OK if mildly annoyed.
Magento's software is built on a web-MVC pattern. Its routing is based on fixed rules that turn paths into controller class names, or you can inject programatic routing objects yourself. It has a separate model layer that's similar to ActiveRecord. It has an EAV Model system built on top of this ActiveRecord-ish system. It has a view layer that's based on creating layout objects and adding individual template based blocks to this layout object. There's an XML based DSL for manipulating this layout object. There is a theme system that lets you distribute custom templates, CSS, and javascript for your system.
Magento's technology is based on PHP, which means you won't have anything like Rack, and you may be deploying to a Apache/MOD_PHP enviornment, or maybe a PHP-FPM enviornment.
Magento 2 is an -- incomplete? -- refactoring of Magento 1, so a lot of programming patterns you'll find will seem incomplete. Sort of like a house that's structurally sound and wired up, but missing outlets.
What will drive you nuts is the practice of Magento Ecommerce development rarely lets you use the underlying framework to develop features. Instead you rely on a lot of pre-made extensions or themes, and occasionally get to do in-house development on a custom extension. You will spend a lot of time debugging other people's code. So find out what the day-to-day work is before you take a job. Talk to other programmers at the company, and/or ask your potential manager/IT director what the work is. If it's an agency full of marketing folks and there are no other programmers or IT folks, realize that you're going to be the technology department.
Wordpress kind of sets the standard for great interfaces for end-users. Drupal is a little more mixed: it is a great experience if the developer updates the UX when they update the site functionality. Concrete5 and other CMSs basically exist soley on the merit of their end-user experience.
Where does ExpressionEngine fall into the mix? How much control does a non-developer admin have with EE, and how pleasant is that interaction for them?
That's really up to you. The backend of EE is completely customizable. It's a blank canvas by default, so you get to build your own backend that is fully customized to fit the exact needs of the client. You can give them more or less control as needed, and you can create different user groups that see different things (including different modules, different menu items, different channels, even different fields within a channel, etc.)
If I'm working with a client that needs a fairly straightforward site (read: brochure site/portfolio site with or w/o blog) and they're not terribly computer savvy, I almost always go with EE because I know I can make it dead simple for them to update their content. For users with a little more knowledge, I tend to give a little more flexibility. It's really up to you how you set it up for them.
I've never had a client complain that EE was difficult to use, and most are actually really surprised at how easy (and some use the word "fun") it actually is.. great confidence boost for people who have always had difficulty updating their site in the past or had to rely on others to do it for them.
Hope that helps :)
A partner has a website that needs to be rebuild from scratch as it simply can't cope with the large number of visitors (currently build using SilverStripe). The site should be able to deal with 5 million or more members using 20+ languages.
We were considering using CodeIgniter or YII because from research both appear to be excellent performers. However several people advised that we should consider the latest version of Joomla for this. For small websites we are happy to use Joomla but for a heavy load website our feeling says that we have to stay away from that. We are however not able to find any comparison between both from a performance point of view but we do require good arguments why Joomla would or would not at all be a good candidate for this. One comparison can be found here: http://vschart.com/compare/yii/vs/joomla/vs/codeigniter however this doens't tell me what to expect when the number of visitors is really high.
Can some advise how Joomla compares to CodeIngitor or YII considering that the site will receive a very high number of vistors and will use a 20+ languages (for silverstripe we build a translator module as the build in CMS was not usefull when using so many translators).
When you're dealing with a site of that scale, it's probably best not to shift to Joomla. Joomla can handle a fair bit, but I'd suggest that it would be far easier to have a Joomla site that large when the site has been adapting as the traffic increases.
Part of what makes your question hard to answer is that we don't know much about what your current site does.
Is it mainly a CMS? If so, Drupal may be a decent fit for you.
Is it a custom web application? It sounds like it could be, based on the number of translations you're handling.
Is it somewhere in-between? This could also be what you're dealing with.
If you're looking at either of the bottom two options, yes, shifting away from SilverStripe (but not to Joomla) sounds like it might be a good thing.
Given the volume of traffic you're dealing with, it sounds like you probably already have a revenue stream and a development team. In that case, it might be worth having a few of your developers play with CodeIgniter and Yii and see what they think.
I wrote up a detailed answer to a question about what type of framework to choose a while ago, which you can look over here:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10095906/yii-or-zend-or-other-frameworks-under-the-following-requirements/10115678#10115678
I'm a Yii fan, having checked out a bunch of other frameworks. Regardless of which framework you use, I'd like to offer one piece of advice that I've found key on all projects I've worked on.
You want to work with objects, not data arrays
The reason for the above is that your models (and the objects they produce) can end up having your business logic built into them. Doing this makes life far, far easier in the long run. A great book on the subject, aimed at manager's and quite high-level (there is no code, although there might be a few lines of psuedo-code), is Object Technology: A Manager's Guide. I'd highly recommend it.
Framework thoughts
CakePHP
I started dabbling with CakePHP until I found out it didn't hand back objects (just arrays), at which point I ran screaming.
CodeIgniter
Looking at what CodeIgniter has for database model support, I think you would quickly hit its limitations with a site of your size, so would recommend against it. And having EllisLabs deciding to leave CodeIgniter behind (see their website for more details) is not a good sign. The signs say stay away.
Of the PHP frameworks out there, these are the ones I hear the most things about:
Symfony 2
Yii (disclosure: I work with this one daily)
Laravel
Symfony
From what I can see of it, has been a huge stimulus to the PHP community and many best practices have come out of that community. Unit testing, Composer, pushes for PSR-1/2, the ideal of modularity of code (some of their core code is ending up in Drupal 8) are all great things that have spurred the PHP community into writing code that's better than spaghetti code. With that said, it feels kind of heavy and enterprise-y and looked to have a pretty heavy learning curve.
Yii
When I was looking for a framework, I had a lot of legacy code that needed migration. Yii's way of handling things, although opinionated at times, has done a lot for me as far as exposing me to good practices that are used heavily on the web. Highly recommended as well.
Laravel
When I was looking for a framework (2+ years ago), Laravel didn't exist. It's apparently quite slick and cutting edge (haven't looked at it yet, I've been busy landing new work regularly in the Yii world), but I am interested in dabbling with it. That said, here's a thoughtful article about Laravel and couple of considerations that I've wondered about.
The main developer, Taylor Ortwell, seemed to be a dominant force. That's a great thing while he's making money doing this and enjoying it. Not sure what would happen to the framework if he decided to do something else.
The speed of development on the framework is an awesome thing and means that all sorts of creative juices are flowing. It's a great place to go look at cool new things. That said, you're going to want your developers to be able to easily find information about the framework they're working with, which in 3-6 months may be severely out of date in the Laravel community. The Ruby on Rails community has the same type of good/bad problem when I've looked around over there; there is so much information about the new stuff that sometimes it's hard to find information about the version of the framework you're dealing with.
That said, there are lots of cool choices out there :-) I should probably wrap up, as this has gone on far longer than I'd intended. Let us know what you end up deciding and how it ends up going.
How big is the site really? Bigger than joomla.org?
Are you talking about big in terms of the amount of content in the database or in terms of the number of visitors.
Joomla really does not have problems with scale unless you are on an older version of MySQL in which case it slows down.
It depends on what kind of application you want.
If you want a CMS, Joomla is the way to go. Because this is what it was build for.
If you are about to create a real "custom" application Yii/Codeigniter is the way to go. (This is what yii was build for)
Regarding performance, from my expericnece Yii is a lot faster, because it comes with way less overhead. You can build the application just as you need it.
Well it's like compare green and salty. Really joomla is CMS, and Yii and CI are frameworks. If you considering make highload on joomla - it's not your job.
If you have high frontend load - maybe watch on js frameworks? Yii+backbone.js or ext.js for frontend is awesome, since you'll move alot to clientside.
CI is dead. I honestly like it, but its dead already. No extensions, no namespaces in future, nothing.
I can say + of Yii:
*faster then CI;
*have great documentation and wiki articles;
*have great and active community and developers;
What else i can add? Active record is good for small databases, but not usable for highloads. Also as i said on yii you can easily make js framework+yii composition. Yii have good caching system. Long time support of stable versions.
I personally manage highload now, but its more backend/api/database. 150+ thousands database records daily, 300+ thousands requests to api, 50 milions records data table. It works like a clock for more then 2 months already.
Choose what you like, or write on native php if its really big system - best choice from practice.
Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which
enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many
aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla
the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is
an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.
CodeIgniter is an Application Development Framework - a toolkit - for
people who build web sites using PHP. Its goal is to enable you to
develop projects much faster than you could if you were writing code
from scratch, by providing a rich set of libraries for commonly needed
tasks, as well as a simple interface and logical structure to access
these libraries. CodeIgniter lets you creatively focus on your project
by minimizing the amount of code needed for a given task.
Yii is a free, open-source Web application development framework
written in PHP5 that promotes clean, DRY design and encourages rapid
development. It works to streamline your application development and
helps to ensure an extremely efficient, extensible, and maintainable
end product.
Joomla can't compare with CodeIgniter / Yii. But, If you need any CMS for your project, you can use Joomla (or maybe Wordpress). If you want to create any web application, then you need to decide for any PHP Framework. I use CodeIgniter for years, and I like it. They have a huge community, and the best user guide. Yii also has a great community and a lot of features. So, you can decide depending on you demand.
I am looking into developing a commercial application using PHP. Since I have experience in CodeIgniter and it has been working well for me, I decided to use it. Now, if ever my application comes to a point that it needs to grow and have to have custom modifications in the platform, is it possible to modify the CodeIgniter source code to the point that it's far from the original?
I'd strongly recommend not modifying the source code as this is the back bone of the application will make updating to futures releases of codeigniter impossible.
Instead you should be creating your own classes/libraries that extend the core bases. This is best practice.
The codeigniter users guide has some fantastic information regarding this, http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/general/creating_libraries.html
Good luck.
Don't modify it, extend it. Ellislab is good about releasing bug fixes and patches, and the last thing you want is to have to re-engineer all the updates into your new hybrid everytime they release updated source code. Plus, different features and bug fixes are released at different paces for the core and reactor, so unless you plan to lock your framework in at the current version, extending is the way to go.
The good news is CI is built for and encourages extensions of the source. The system folder and the application folder separation are a clear indication of how you should segregate your enhancements from the base libraries.
CodeIgniter is written in PHP. You can completely rewrite the framework anyway you like. So the answer is "yes".
There are many big websites that were written in a different language or build on a framework when they started and have been rewritten many times since. I think a lot of developers (mostly freelancers) are over-thinking when starting out. When I start a project, then I try to get it done and get it out in the web asap. If a website starts taking of - and most of the times start making you money - then you can always take the time to rewrite it.
I think it is a lot more important to spend time when you plan and design your database and tables. I think it is a lot harder to redo parts of your database later on then it is to rewrite the code that uses the data.
Just my 2 cents.
If you have used CI, then you should know that being a PHP framework that all of the source-code is there in the download, furthermore opening the system and application folders and looking through there will tell you a lot. Yes all of the source is there in plain English (plain programming English) and not only is it in plain English but has been extensively documented inside and out (literally that is in the source and in the user-guide). CI gained initial fame from that simple fact, that all code is extensively and meticulously documented.
Beyond all that, the question itself raises concerns that maybe you should study CI a bit further before writing commercial applications using it. Ci is a powerful and very easy to use PHP framework, but it is not a WYSIWYG. In my opinion, a coder should know his tools inside and out in order to be able to create a solid secure and trusted application. The first measure of which is to read the user manual, you should know at the very least everything in it, and since there are 12 sections in it that cover everything from extending CI libraries to creating your own libraries, and everything in between I would say you need to spend a little more time with it.
I want to say though, I am not being rude or trying to shame you in any way I am simply saying that you should learn the framework a bit more before venturing into a commercial application using it.
In the early days of PHP people realized how amazingly easy it was to use and how fast you could write an application with it. At the time the major options where very difficult for new and hobby programmers to use or involved expensive software to run, PHP was free, easy to learn and most of all ran on a free OS. It also took hardly any setup to get going, you could download PHP and essentially be programming in minutes. All of these factors lead to the almost destruction of the language.
Entry level programmers were destroying it with bits of code taken from other applications, never knowing (or caring) what the code actually did beyond the simple fact that it did what they wanted at the time, never considering or even investigating if the code might be harmful. Because of this practice PHP applications that had grown to Goliath sized websites, taking thousands of hits an hour were:
beginning to crash
being hacked to reveal sensitive customer/client data
generally crumbling all around the web
All because since the language was so easy to use that people had taken advantage of it and failed to take time to learn it. PHP was becoming a joke to other professional programmers and wasn't even thought of as a viable application language by many who had dubbed it "the copy and paste" language.
So my advice to you, please take the time to know your tools inside and out, what makes them tick, if they have any gotchas and where they are vulnerable. I understand that in order to learn a language to a professional level you have to build with it so I suggest that you take it slow with CI stick to the core for now. Trust me when I say that even in its purest form CI is an amazing and powerful tool that in the right hands can create awesome powerful web application, but in the uneducated/inexperienced hands it can create havoc and destruction.
So (stepping off of the soap box) I simply ask that if you are serious about creating commercial applications period that you take your time and learn your tools/language become as close to an expert on them as possible. I gurentee that if you do that you will always have work when you need it and you will spend less hours beating your head against the table or worse explaining to a client why their site is down.
I truly wish you good luck, just slow down and learn your trade and you will do just fine.
Yes, Codeigniter is an open source framework. However, I would advise against modifying the core of Codeigniter, as most files can be extended and rewritten safely without modifying the core files which will cause you headaches if you ever decide to update.
To extend a core class by default you would do this in Codeigniter. We'll extended the parser class for this example, but this applies to all classes pretty much. This link in the comprehensive user guide will give you all the information you need to extended and overload methods inside of a Codeigniter core class: http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/general/core_classes.html
At my institution, we have a small library with 150 books and 50
users. We would like to use a simple online management system that
displays the books, lets users search and enter when they get and
return a book. (There is no librarian, the books are just in an
otherwise empty room.)
I'm not familiar with modern web content management systems. In the
old days, I would have just implemented a quick Perl/CGI script, but I
think there are better options nowadays?
What would be the simplest way to get/implement such a system? Django?
Ruby on Rails? Ideally, I'd like to just run it in my user account
without having to install database support etc.
Is it possible to do everything on one dynamic HTML page? What role
does AJAX play in such a system?
I suggest take a look at the available open source tools for libraries before deciding to build one from scratch:
http://www.libsuccess.org/index.php?title=Open_Source_Software#Great_Free.2FOpen_Source_Tools_for_Libraries
Another good resource in your research: http://www.oss4lib.org/
If you find an existing tool that fits the bill (or enough to make it worth extending), that will be important in guiding what platform/language/framework and techniques will be best to use.
If you want a quick and easy solution, you might want to consider using SQLite as the database backend, since it does not require any configuration or setup (except for the tables, of course).
If you have a machine standing around there, you could take a look at Qt/C++ or PyQt to create a simple user interface.
Pylons (there are lots of alternatives!) or any other web framework might do the job as well, but I guess it would be more work to create a web application than a quick and simple desktop application for this job.
This is quite a complicated question doesn't have a simple answer. The best I can do is point you in the direction of some resources to get you started:
Framework/CMS
Unfortunately, most frameworks require at least some minimal kind of db interaction. While this is not true for all, it would probably be easiest to steer clear of a framework, you probably don't need that much overhead anyway.
Javascript/AJAX
If you want things to happen without any seperate pageloads, then sure, you can use some ajax. However, you probably don't need anything this sophisiticated
How I Would Do It
If you really trusted your students enough to be diligent about checking in/out books, I think it would be easiest to just have a form on a webpage somewhere that they could enter the number of the book they are checking in/out. Then store the state of each book in a text file somewhere (you said you didn't want to use any db's), or even look into sqlite.
Again, you probably don't need all the overhead of a full framework/CMS. It would be fairly trivial to, as you said, write a quick script to handle the ISDN, ID, Title, Whatever of the book they are checking in/out.
Also, there are significantly easier languages to write scripts in these days than Perl and CGI. Try PHP, Ruby, or Java