Digital Text CMS

[Warrior]

AdvancedContent has moved on and given way to Digital Text CMS.
AdvancedContent was based on the theory of providing the user with basic things (downloads, forum, etc.) as opposed to doing what I wanted it to do...manage content.

Digital Text will have this ability. You will be able to add pages (static HTML for the most part) and moduels (dynamic stuff).

AdvancedContent used it's own template engine which wasn't too shabby but it was a bit restrictive and made things over complicated.
Digital Text uses Smarty (smarty.php.net) an awesome template engine which makes templating easy and FLEXIBLE for the user. (Instead of me organizing the output of say an array of news entries, the user can himself using built in things to loop through arrays passed to the template)-- this results in a GREAT increase in flexibility to the designer and less hassle to the programmer.

The big advantage I think this will have is it's compact size. Since none of the things in AdvancedContent (forums, downloads, news, pm) are implemented into the core the CMS keeps a small size which allows it to be easily adapted to any purpose.

A live demo (live meaning being worked on) is availible at: www.advancedcontent.net/demo (As of now it is not very interactive just some output)

[Sidoh]

Digital Text uses Smarty (smarty.php.net) an awesome template engine which makes templating easy and FLEXIBLE for the user.

Copier.

[Warrior]

Ersan told me about this a while back. Actually smarty is pretty easy to use on all servers, you just plop it in a dir (/lib) and instantiate the class Smarty (include Smarty.class.php)

[Warrior]

Hmm got a lot of planning to do with how things will interact with each other, going to sleep on it.

[Sidoh]

Ersan told me about this a while back. Actually smarty is pretty easy to use on all servers, you just plop it in a dir (/lib) and instantiate the class Smarty (include Smarty.class.php)

I'm using it, noob. 

That entire CMS (www.sidoh.org/test/scms) uses Smarty.  I've extended the smarty engine slightly to fit the way I want my CMS to work.  It's not very significant, but it saves time and keystrokes.

By the way, it's better to just 'plop' a /smarty directory somewhere within your CMS.  Installing it otherwise would be too much of a hassle.

[Warrior]

Ersan told me about this a while back. Actually smarty is pretty easy to use on all servers, you just plop it in a dir (/lib) and instantiate the class Smarty (include Smarty.class.php)

I'm using it, noob. 

That entire CMS (www.sidoh.org/test/scms) uses Smarty.  I've extended the smarty engine slightly to fit the way I want my CMS to work.  It's not very significant, but it saves time and keystrokes.

By the way, it's better to just 'plop' a /smarty directory somewhere within your CMS.  Installing it otherwise would be too much of a hassle.

Haha same here, I wrote a class which extends smarty and implemented an abstraction layer of sorts because I am a control freak. Like yours not very vital significant changes (maybe automating a few things here+there, nothing big)

Well yea by "plop" I meant in a dir within your CMS, oops.

[Sidoh]

Haha same here, I wrote a class which extends smarty and implemented an abstraction layer of sorts because I am a control freak. Like yours not very vital significant changes (maybe automating a few things here+there, nothing big)

Well yea by "plop" I meant in a dir within your CMS, oops.

I wasn't aware that /lib was a common DocumentRoot. 

[Warrior]

I use it anyway.

/demo/lib/smarty
/demo/templates
/demo/templates_c
/demo/cache
/includes

Everything with the CMS no special installation no hassle

[Sidoh]

I use it anyway.

/demo/lib/smarty
/demo/templates
/demo/templates_c
/demo/cache
/includes

Everything with the CMS no special installation no hassle

Haha.  I installed it in /<DocumentRoot>/test/scms/classes/smarty.  Also, why wouldn't you set up /demo/configs given your naming pattern?

[Warrior]

I havn't used them, I plan to use them though for multi language support possibly.

[Sidoh]

I havn't used them, I plan to use them though for multi language support possibly.

Hehe, that's a great use of them.

Smarty's really nice, but it's hard to know when to use PHP for your core instead of using Smarty for templates.  It's difficult to seperate layout from core like that in some respects.  I think I was talking to iago about this a while ago.  He said he thought the whole idea of templates was so you could keep the graphic designers away from your code, but Smarty actually encourages them to interact with the code.  I suppose that's a positive and negative thing, really.

[Quik]

I suggest you create a "features" section of your site containing links to code, and build in the "obtain feature list" function that gives the ACP a list of available features, with links to click to install said features. That way people can install the basic core, and customize it later (IE: Adding PM with the click of one link, etc.)

[Warrior]

I don't know I plan to take a simplistic approach at this. I read anything in the /mod folder and mark it as a possible module.
A module to be loaded must communicate with the core and identify itself. I guess I can perhaps mark them as "Loaded" or "Non Loaded" to get the effect of starting and stopping it. Maybe.

I'm still cleaning up some things in the core and writing my authentication class to do stuff with templates.

[Sidoh]

I suggest you create a "features" section of your site containing links to code, and build in the "obtain feature list" function that gives the ACP a list of available features, with links to click to install said features. That way people can install the basic core, and customize it later (IE: Adding PM with the click of one link, etc.)

Taking this sort of approach for this kind of project wouldn't work all that well, assuming he's using the templating method I'm imagining.  It would be hard to implement a plugin-like interface if everything is going to be templated.  You'd have to develop templates for all of your plugins.  :\

I don't know I plan to take a simplistic approach at this. I read anything in the /mod folder and mark it as a possible module.
A module to be loaded must communicate with the core and identify itself. I guess I can perhaps mark them as "Loaded" or "Non Loaded" to get the effect of starting and stopping it. Maybe.

I'm still cleaning up some things in the core and writing my authentication class to do stuff with templates.

Hehe, I'm thinking about doing something like that for the CMS I'm starting to write now too.  We'll see... Like I've already mentioned, making everything templated using this structure's going to be a challenge.

[Blaze]

Why don't you two just team up?  You're doing very similiar things...