Starting a PHP project - getting things right the first time

Question

Hi

I am going to start a PHP project soon ... a CMS designed specifically for my clients focusing on simplicity, etc.

What I am looking for is a well established project that I can refer to... not plagiarise or copy, merely something to learn from. I want to refer to this project to see what hurdles they had to overcome, how they dealt with issues such as code portability and the like.

I'm not looking for answers like: 'Why rewrite a CMS... look at Drupal/Joomla/etc'. But I am looking for a guide to look into and educate myself. I want to get it right, from the beginning. Our old custom CMS (not written by me) is coded quite amateurishly and changes/addons/extending is much more difficult than it should be. Security is also light to non-existent.

I was going to look at Wordpress, but thought I'd ask here first. Feel free to recommend even a personal project, if you feel you have a well designed and coded application. Remember I just want something as a guide. Links to tutorials or articles are fine too.

I appreciate your time. Thanks.

Note: If I feel I've created something useful, I'll be happy to release it back to the open source community. Though it'll be just another PHP CMS :P

The site will be coded to work optimally on Linux with Apache, and PHP 5.

Answer 1

CMS Made Simple might be an useful reference. Much simpler than Wordpress/Drupal/etc. It's nice to prototype to learn, but seriously, I wouldn't offer an exercise work to paying clients when there's plethora of free and good alternatives that have gone through years of serious development.

Answer 2

I think you are underestimating the definition of "CMS" and building one - these things will take one person a year to make from scratch to begin being usable (don't forget client testing!)

I came into this question thinking you would be asking for what kind of environment - and I was going to recommend using Eclipse/Aptana Studio, with a lamp/apache installation and virtual hosts set up. The latter is important, because you'll need to run multiple versions of the same site in order to test things, especially if you are going to invert time doing svn too.

Answer 3

Check out FrogCMS, I find it to be simple, efficient and easily extendable.

Answer 4

you can try XOOPS

Answer 5

have a look at codeignitor and kohanaphp. they are both generic frameworks which you can build a cms ontop of. my personal preference is kohanaphp for php5

i have found them quick and easy to learn, and provide a good structure for extensibility, which will allow you to concentrate on the cms part of your code instead

Answer 6

I think it's important to have a clear architecture. Take the best things from "frameworks", but leave out the bloatness. For example, MVC is something you should have in your project you'll thank yourself later.