Article Discussion: Building a Site Engine with PHP, Part 1

Content management systems are becoming very popular, but what if you took it a step further than that? That’s exactly what I plan to show you how to do in this series of articles. I’m going to explain how to build a site engine. A site engine is a core code base and database that can run multiple sites that are completely different while all running in unison, using all the same code, yet separate from each other.


Read the full article here: Building a Site Engine with PHP, Part 1

Hey James - that's the beginning of an excellent article. I look forward to the next N parts in the series. Please don't be like some other devshed authors and leave everyone hangin', never producing the subsequent articles necessary to realize your vision. Thanks,

lo_fye

Great job on the setup. Please keep them coming. I am looking forward to the other 4.
Please don't forget us!

Probably the best "dumbed down" version of explaining a CMS I've ever read in my entire life. Even I could read through it and understand the concepts (with the help of pretty pictures ) without going back and re-reading every other paragraph.

Thanks for the first installment of what looks to be a great series of articles. One question I have is what is the difference bwtween a plugin and a module?

Thanks!

I've built a min site engine or content management system for managing my site in php. The article offers many additional insights.

I've been developing with PHP and MySQL for awhile now and after banging my head on the wall countless times, I thought I'd developed a kindof site engine... however, I was really happy to see that someone else had thought this through. I'm looking forward to seeing the following articles -- please, please follow through!

Cheers!

hey guys, sorry about taking so long to check the thread, I didn't realize the article had been published yet :P thanks for all the great feed back

tfardella: to answer your question, a the plugins are like the main controller over a group of modules and blocks, it kind of provideds all the functions and data a block or module will need.

a module on the other hand, processes all the actions that a block produces.

Say you have a block that has a form that will post the text from a text box to the table cell above the form ( like a small non realtime chatroom) the plugin would get all the info for the block to be able to show the already posted text, while the module would contain the scripts to add, edit, and delete text.

The second part is up btw, it's the one that talks more about the plugins and modules

I read thru the first part of the article and the descriptions given sounded awful familiar.

The wheel is being reinvented. The site management system being described here is call PHP - Nuke (http://www.phpnuke.org).

It is awesome. There are quite a few resources about this site management / portal system.

Hope this will help in those who have questions about modules and blocks and stuff. I know that really confused me when I stated looking at it.

Ignore what nmphpwebdev said, this is not based off of phpnuke or postnuke or any nuke for that matter. its based off a site engine that hasnt been released. you havent seen this code anywhere before, because it hasnt been publicly available.

I'm still working on a working copy of the site engine based on these articles, the only thing im stumped on is how modules actually work and how to call a needed module for the requested page/function. i was thinking of making the modules classes but then that gets into a whole other problem. But I will keep updating you guys as things progress, but I wont give you a completed package either, just helpful hints here and there.

But dont give up, these articles will help you produce a working engine, if you be patient and follow each step and understand how everything works. And it is possible to use it on PHP4, you just have to write your own XML parser.

Dude, with respect, what the hell are you talking about?
I've read the article and this thread a couple times each, and at no point could I get enough information together to work out what a plugin/module/block was and how they each differed from each other. Perhaps calling them by three different names that didn't all mean the same thing would be helpful - like 'data controller', 'output processor' etc or something... I can't make head or tail of any of the articles because it's unclear. Not even a picture of what a module actually physically is, likewise any of the others. I don't get it.

I appreciate the work and the code looks solid and will be helpful, but it appears that the age-old problem of communication breakdown is upon us. Maybe it's my lack of development experience in this area that's causing the confusion.

Anyway, I'm just frustrated cos I want to use all the articles and currently feel like I can't...


Thanks anyway though...

The author scares my quite a bit with his comments on this subject. He says that he uses cookies so that the user must be authenticated every visit so that they can't be spoofed. I'm not sure what that has to do one way or another with cookies versus sessions. The entire point of sessions is that you store a seceret key on the users computer (normaly via a cookie) that is then used to retrieve there session which would include there login information etc. The biggest advantage to this is that no information is stored on the users computer except for the session which will expire after a given amount of time.

Sessions then allow you to store per visit/session information and not worry about prying eyes getting the cookie. Even is someone steals your session it will expire eventualy. A cookie with username and password info would be good until the user changes his password though.

As far as security goes i've always heard that you should move from cookies (as data storage) to sessions, not the other way around.

I would be interested if the author has some more concrete examples of why he thinks cookies should be used, and why he thinks that sessions vs. cookies is an either or situation.

Just my 2 cents of course, but it made me cringe when I read this use of cookies.