I'm in the process of quoting out a website build for a law firm.
I was hoping you could give me your opinions on what the best CMS system would be to easily achieve what they want.
It's a basic informational website. News, About Us, List of Attorneys, Attorney Bios, etc. They would like to be able to easily edit all of these sections.
I was looking into Joomla as a CMS solution to allow them to do this, but I am unsure that it will get the job done (keep in mind I don't have much experience with it however). Joomla seems to revolve around "Articles". This would be fine for the News section, but when it comes to the List of Attorneys (which would have name, location, contact) and would need to be sortable, etc. I don't get the feeling it would get the job done. This could easily be my lack of understanding however.
With a site like this, what do you think the best back-end system would be for them to update this type of content?
This sounds like a rather standard website.
Most CMS-es, open source or proprietary, will solve your usecase rather easily. It really boils down to what tools you are familiar with and if you have special needs.
Of open source CMS-es Plone will easily solve your challenges, and if you prefer php-based solutions, joomla, drupal or wordpress will probably do so as well.
There is a comparisation of their respective strengths and disadvantages available here:
http://www.idealware.org/reports/2010-os-cms
As a developer who's made more than a couple very successful Joomla websites I can definitely say you're misunderstanding 'articles' in this case.
You can have an 'About Us' page, a 'Contact Us' Page, any page you want. Each 'page' is just listed as an 'article' in the backend to make it easy for someone who doesn't know the system to have an idea where to look to edit that 'page'.
In terms of 'lists' of things - there are so many great extensions already written for Joomla you would be really hard pressed to find a better CMS that will allow you to get exactly what you're looking for as quickly or as easily. K2 is great for certain situations but I don't think it would fit the bill for this project.
What you mentioned seems like a standard Joomla install honestly, straight out of the box. A few pages and a list of attorneys? No sweat. You might even look into the Sobi2 component for Joomla - a fully customizable component originally designed as a 'business index' that would probably fit the bill almost perfectly for a 'list of attorneys' and could be as large, or as small as you want. I use it on one of my sites and in that 'list' of providers we have probably 250+ listings from all over the US. However, I'd only recommend it if it's going to get some use - otherwise you're probably fine just using the Joomla system without any plugin.
It sounds like you read a quick overview of Joomla and made a decision without having actually looked into what it can do, or looked at the demo sites created with it. Check it out again, and take a deeper look.
In fact, I had an attorney contact me relating to a Joomla site, and I had him a site up and running within about 4 hours. He had a template he wanted used, so I just installed the template, put in the text he wanted in the particular pages (i.e. articles) and it was done!
Have a look at the content component K2 for Joomla : http://getk2.org/
It allows you to easily create some kind of "pattern of articles", with additional informations, fields,..., then cou can sort them,...
Look here: http://php.opensourcecms.com/ There is a big list of great OpenSource CMS Software, choose the one which has the features which you need.
I don't have a lot of Joomla experience, so can't speak to that; but SharePoint "revolves" around lists, so it will fit your requirements pretty well.
Related
I've heard mixed things about this. I know it's easy when you're stuck to simply enable PHP in the template and hack your way around a problem. However, it almost always introduces potential security issues, and makes a mess of your template to boot.
In most cases where PHP is used, it would be cleaner to write a simple plugin in PHP to achieve what you need.
My question is this: Is it ever acceptable to use PHP inside ExpressionEngine templates? Or is this considered bad practice? If you were a developer who inherited a site I coded, would you cringe if you saw PHP inside templates?
This could just as easily be a question on the merits of eval() and whether it should ever be used. Most of the answers to questions along those lines are equally applicable here.
My view is that enabling PHP in templates is always a Bad Idea. At best, it's not a terrible idea, but there's always a better option. A custom addon will invariably be a better approach, even with seemingly harmless code snippets. I think it's also most likely to be used by those least qualified to use it. Personally, when I started building sites with EE my PHP skills ranged somewhere between 'totally inept' and 'knows enough to be dangerous'. At that time, if I came across a limitation in EE's code I'd often implement a solution via some inline PHP, partly because the idea of developing a custom addon seemed too daunting and partly because clicking a little 'enable PHP' radio button was so simple. Years later, whenever I need to update one of these sites, I definitely do cringe. Here are some of the side effects of PHP in templates:
Potentially introducing serious security vulnerabilities.
Increasing load times, potentially by a lot.
Debugging code becomes harder (good luck figuring out which file/line number has that error).
With tools like Pkg.io you can have the groundwork for an addon in place in 30 seconds. It requires a tiny amount of extra effort, but the gains are well worth it.
Let's imagine I'm answering this question as part of the 80% of people building websites with ExpressionEngine who may consider themselves as designers and or people who have little to no PHP experience:
Is it ever acceptable to use PHP inside ExpressionEngine templates?
No it's not acceptable, please don't do it!
Or is this considered bad practice?
Yup, pretty much.
If you were a developer who inherited a site I coded, would you cringe
if you saw PHP inside templates?
Definitely would cringe and maybe even curse a little.
Okay, now let's imagine I'm answering as part of the 20% who would consider themselves as an EE developer and or who have most experience programming over say designer all day:
Is it ever acceptable to use PHP inside ExpressionEngine templates?
Once in a while it's acceptable. For example you might find a need to turn on PHP for this Stash setup. It really depends on the complexity of what you are trying to achieve. Most things should go into an add-on whenever possible and being "lazy" doesn't count as a time when PHP is acceptable in templates.
Or is this considered bad practice?
ExpressionEngine and Codeigniter for that matter provide a great base to build add-ons and best practices include proper separation when ever possible. This includes separation from PHP and Templates; more often than not.
If it can go into an add-on it should as mentioned before. With that said, there isn't really anything limiting you from using PHP in templates except knowing that this may have security implications, cause future headaches for clients and other devs/designers etc.
If you were a developer who inherited a site I coded, would you cringe
if you saw PHP inside templates?
Definitely wouldn't cringed (unless your PHP was a disaster right from the start) though, would probably question why such simple and even complex code wasn't where it belonged; in an add-on.
Note: I pulled the percents out of thin air though, they quite possibly could be close to reality.
Also note: I realize the use of designer/developer in my answer could be seen as stereotyping though, wasn't quite sure how to avoid it. Hope no one takes offense.
I would consider using something like the phpstringfun add-on. This splits the different, but you're still working in EE tags.
I wouldn't sweat using small amounts of well-documented PHP in templates, but keep it as simple and abstracted as you can.
I have an email account whose sole purpose it is to store interesting and useful links to programming articles, code, and blog posts. It has become a little knowledgebase of sorts. I can even do a search on it, which is pretty cool.
However, after using this account for a couple of years, I now have 775 links, and it has become this big blob of amorphous information, most of which I have never looked at again. I take comfort in the fact that, if I really needed to, I could find something in there again, if I even remember putting it in there in the first place. But it has developed a "smell," if you will.
How are you organizing your programming library of cool stuff? Do you have a system or tool, and is it better than the way I'm doing it?
I would use something that is made for storing bookmarks. I use delicious.com for all of my bookmarks. The tagging system works perfectly for technology sites because you can tag each page with a specific language or tech abbreviation. This coupled with the Delicious Bookmarks plugin will make it very easy to tag sites and get back to them.
Use one word or abbreviations for languages: java c# vb.net python
Use acronyms for technologies: wpf wcf
I used to use the standard bookmark system in the browser but since I bounce around through various machines and browsers throughout the day I started to use bookmark synchronizers. Both Foxmarks and the one that google came out with. But neither I was completely satisfied with. Plus delicious has a great web interface to it as a decent api to extend for your own purpose.
IMHO, using Evernote to store this information is great.
1) you can go back and search through it easily
2) organize by tags and "notebooks collections"
3) available on multiple platforms (even mobile)
4) available as browser plugins (for direct archiving in-browser)
The only drawback is it's copy-paste functionality is a little lacking (it sometimes doesn't import/display the CSS styles correctly).
Otherwise, it's a great alternative to store web "bookmarks" (and also archive the content at the same time).
As part of a wide ranging job for a cystic fibrosis support organization, they'd also like a web site set up and I've decided on Apache running on Linux (due to its security and low cost mostly). Other than (fairly) static content, they also want a forum where people can discuss issues with the condition - it'll be attached to a hospital chain so there'll be plenty of medical staff there who know little about the web.
I can handle all the specific coding and Apache setup since I've done it before but I'm interested in people's opinions as to whether I should roll my own forum software or get a hold of some ready-built stuff. I've not had any experience with forum software but I could generate my own (initially buggy, I'm sure) in a month or so.
It'll require registration and login to leave comments (but guest access just to read) and I'd like it to be 'pretty' (excuse me while I remember damning customers for providing similarly vague requirements specs :-) but not necessarily infinitely-configurable with skins/themes/etc.
If anyone has some compelling reasons (and experience with specific products that can provide what I need), I'd be interested in hearing about them. Alternatively, does anyone have any 'gotchas' they experienced while coding their own forum software?
Advantages to rolling your own:
a non-standard custom-built system means you'll be less prone to "standard" attacks (e.g.: a vulnerability in PunBB) since bad guys tend to bother with exploit-hunting only on widely-deployed systems (more return on their investment)
absolute control over how your system works and looks
you'll learn a lot
Disadvantages:
you'll repeat mistakes other people have already solved
it'll take you longer to get up and running
long-term it'll be more maintenance (since you have to fix bugs & add features yourself).
you can't "leverage the community" -- if you choose an off-the-shelf forum that has a plugin system then there's a whole bunch of community add-ons that won't be available for your custom forum software.
There's a GIANT list of forum software on wikipedia -- there's most likely something in there that will suit your needs that you can get up and running quickly.
IMHO the old "don't build what you can buy" adage applies to this (well, the web 2.0 version is obviously "don't build what you can download"). Have a look around at the available forum software, pick one that covers 99% of your needs and tweak it to do the rest.
If you still want to build your own forum software that'll probably be a cool side project but if the job is to get a forum up and running, then go and download one - don't try to mix up the desire to do cool stuff and the day job unless the day job is just to do cool stuff only.
One of the best-kept secrets on the internets is a little gem called FUDforum, by Ilia Alshanetsky.
And yes, it's the same Ilia who wrote xDebug's original profiler code, improved the caching in MMcache, fixed several security bugs in libmcrypt, and who was the release manager for the PHP language from 4.3.3 to 4.3.6+. He is, as my friends in Boston would say, wicked smaart.
Because of this, FUDforum is robust, ridiculously fast and more secure than probably any other part of your web application will ever be. It comes with a neat install script and it has all the features you'll need.
Plus, it's not a high-profile target like phpBB or vBulletin, which means you won't have to worry about spambots constantly banging on the gates.
Having written my own forum software before...
It seems like a simple problem, but when you get into it, you find that there's a lot of little things that you'd like to do nicer, and it takes a lot of time. Mine was cool and all, and I did get paid for it, but if I was doing it over again (which has also happened), I'd use a customizable pre-made solution, and spend all my spare time doing something productive. :)
Forum softwares tend to have rather complex minimum requirements. A few things you are very likely to need do matter what you do:
Forum/thread/post hierarchy;
User system;
Security system (eg user/admin classes and all kinds of restrictions for users);
Gathering statistics;
BBCodes or some other minimized markup language (NEVER allow users to do full HTML);
File uploads and avatars;
Bans and other punishments;
CAPTCHAs;
etc.
Ready made forum systems provide this out-of-the-box and lots more. Setup is mostly easy too. Why do it all over again yourself?
My answer would be: don't reinvent the wheel, there are plenty of fora software out there. My preference would go for RForum if you need only that.
I'd say, don't waste your time. phpBB 3 is pretty stable, usable and feature-rich forum. We use it at work (for our internal discussions), and I really don't have anything bad to say about it.
I'd concur with most of the above posters that since you want something which appears fairly standard, why reinvent something that already exists?
Like any development, creating forum software is probably much harder than it looks! There will be problems solved in the existing software which you haven't even considered.
It's worth adding that if you do require any specific additional functionality, you can always build that on top of an existing solution anyway, which is especially easy if you have the source code (whether open source or commercial).
From the sounds of the website that you are building, there is the potential for the forum to be a highly useful and visible resource, it would be good to go with something that already exists, due to the quality of a lot of the products out there and the rich communities that surround them.
I think that vBulletin, although a paid for product, would suit your needs and give you a great base to build a community on.
vanilla is pretty bare bones and easy to configure, perhaps find a system which is easy to extend vs building everything yourself
Ready built until you have some really unique features needed that can be tied to money it will make you.
Recently I've been doing lots of weekend coding, and have began to really need a bugtracker as things are gaining speed. This is probably the worst case scenario because I basically have to let things cool down over the week,so I simply can't remember the bugs in my head. So far I've been using a text file to jot down bugs,but I'd rather use something a bit better.
The biggest points here are ease of use and very little setup time.Don't want to spend more than an hour learning the basics and trying to install something. Also in my case I'm on a Mac so that would help, but solutions for other platforms are welcomed as they will likely help others.
FogBugz has a student/startup edition that's free indefinitely, for 2 or less users.
Personally, I use Excel. (Wait, come back, I'm not crazy!) For a bigger / team project, I've gotten a ton of mileage out of Bugzilla, but that tends to be kind of overkill for a one-person project.
But, a well-organized spreadsheet, with columns for things like "status", "description", "code module", "resolved date," etc, gets you pretty close to what you'd need for a small project. Sorting a spreadsheet by column isn't anywhere near a search, but its a whole lot better than "find in text file."
Heck, if you use Google docs rather than excel, you can even publish the thing as an RSS feed and get it anywhere.
And, the major advantage is that the setup time and learning curve are both effectively nil.
Addendum: And of course, the instant your "One-Person Bug Tracker" becomes a "Two-Person Bug Tracker" you must switch to something better. Bugzilla, FogBugz, anything. Trust me, I've been there.
Trac or Redmine are both pretty good. I don't know how easy they are to set up on a Mac.
It's worth mentioning that FogBugz also has a free version for up to 2 users, which would suit you. It is hosted so there is no installation and you can use something like Fluid to access it in its own window.
I don't think you need a full blown bugtracker for your scenario.
Try tiddly wiki, store each bug in a tiddler and give them tags like 'open' or 'closed'.
There is no installation required (only one html file), and it's very easy to use.
And platform neutral.
If you're working on a LAMPP stack, then for ease of setup and use I would probably recommend Mantis. It's written in PHP / MySQL and the only installation involved was specifying where the database should be created and what credentials should be used.
Oh, and its FOSS.
I would suggest Omnigroup's Omnifocus - it's an excellent task tracker, and if you just make the mental leap from bug to task, I think it works famously for one man projects as well as being an excellent way to organize your no doubt burgeoning task queue.
Eclipse has a really interesting system--I don't know why so few people seem to know about it.
It's tied in with their to-do list. It gives you the ability to enter bugs with as much or as little info as you like. You can tie it to versioning or an external bug tracker if you like. It's a decent bug tracker in itself.
The real trick is how it works with your source code.
Before you begin work you select a bug from the list. All the time you're coding, it tracks what files you are editing. It can close old tabs for you, and will also highlight areas of the source tree that you have modified a lot.
The nice thing is, you can go back to any bug you've edited an you will get your "Environment" back. Not only all your notes and stuff, but the same tabs will open up and the same sections of code in the navigator will be highlighted.
Also eclipse works with virtually any language, it's not just restricted to Java...
let me put in a good word for ditz - it's a bit bare-bones, but it has the invaluable feature that bugs are checked into your repository. it's also very easy to use once you get used to its way of doing things
You can use fogbugz for free if you're a one man team.
It's super easy to use and quick to learn.
They made it so that bugs are really easy to enter, no mandatory fields.
I'm the author of BugTracker.NET mentioned in another post. If I were looking for a tracker for JUST ONE PERSON with MINIMUM hassle, I'd use FogBugz, because it's hosted. No installation, no need to worry about backups.
But, what are you doing about version control? Don't you have to worry about that too, and backing that up? If so, consider something like Unfuddle or CVSDude where you can get BOTH Subversion and Trac, or Subversion and Fogbugz.
I use Mantis at home and I'm happy with it. It can be a pain in the arse to get it working so you can choose to download a free and ready-made VM installation. Cannot be easier than that,
Maybe a spreadsheet would be the next logical step? I know it sounds really un-sexy, but if you're the only user, you don't have to worry much about others mucking it up, and it adds a few basic features over a text file like sorting. Then if you later need to graduate to something RDBMS-backed, you would likely have a feasible import path. I just know that for me, when working by myself, I don't tend to get around to putting bugs in anything that requires more care and feeding than that (of course when working with others the collaborative needs make a more defined repository a requirement, but that's a different story).
EDIT: After noting the availability of free, hosted access to FogBugz, I'm re-thinking the bar for care and feeding...
RT from BestPractical is great.
I also get a lot of mileage out of just keeping a list of items in a text file with vi, if I can express them all in one line. This is usually for many small todo items on a single component or task.
I've tried bugtracker.net and even though it's a little bit rough on the edges, it's free and was built with ASP.NET:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=66812
Are you using a source control repository as well? If not, you really should, even though you're only a one-man team.
My personal preference is to use a VMWare Virutal Application (free) that offers no-hassle setup gives you access to both Trac and Subversion. You can find many different virual appliances through searching. Here is one example of getting a Trac/SVN virtual appliance up and running:
http://www.rungeek.com/blog/archives/how-to-setup-svn-and-trac-with-a-virtual-appliance/
Trac is an excellent project management tool that sports a bug tracker, wiki, and integrated source control management. It's adaptable to your needs, and fits me very well personally.
I use bugzilla for this purpose. Plus for me was that it has integration with Eclipse (precisely with Mylyn). FogBuzz has it to but AFAIK it is nonfree.
Plus it sits on my laptop so I can code and add/remove bugs when offline (it was biggest disadvantage of hosted solutions for me)
Installation was not a problem in Ubuntu (and any debian-based distro I suppose).
I dig ELOG in those cases, it's more of a personal blog, but it's easy to handle and install, the data is local on your computer and you can search all entries via fulltext. Always sufficed for me.
If you have a Windows box with IIS and MSSQL (including SQL Server Express), you should look at Bugtracker.net. It is free and open source (you get the source code), and it is extensible.
Even if you are a one man shop, having a free bug tracking system with this much power will allow you to grow over time, because it is fairly easy to add future users into the system.
You can also customize it for the look of your organization, business or product.
Ontime 2008 by Axosoft is free for a single user licence. It's industrial strength and will give you alot more that just bug tracking!
http://www.axosoft.com
Jira which now has free personal licenses.
I am using leo for this purpose. To be more specific, its cleo plugin.
Of course you might need to spend some time to get used to leo, but it will pay off.
A flat text file is just a list, an Excel spreadsheet is a two-dimensional list.
leo lets you keep the data in a tree! And it also has clones.
What are the best open source image gallery engines? Both stand-alone, and for existing frameworks such as Wordpress or Drupal.
Hopefully we can build a good list here over time.
Gallery is the classic choice. It has skins, security layers, heaps of plugins, etc, but can be run with the default settings easily if you want to. I've used it for years.
GOOD QUESTION, lots of people ask this in many web forums so hopefully we will get some good responses to this, and have a good list of solutions.
Personally I always used to say something like Gallery or some other OS script, but recently I have found myself using more and more something like a simple php script which just spits our a list of images (maybe 7 a page) but relying on a Javascript library such as mootools or Ext to provide all the functionality, particularly for small or individual galleries. Im particularly loving the noobslide mootools class at the moment which has some lovely gallery effects.
Noobslide
I suppose at the end of the day its all down to what you need, there will be no one answer that fits all but a number of different solutions will hopefully show up here that will suit different peoples needs.