Hi all,
I see that many have attempted to write but not complete a content management system for myBB
I have started work on my own and am looking for some feedback on the ideas to see if it is worth putting certain things in.
So far I have the following already written
- Admin Add, Edit, Delete content
- Add edit delete categories
- Categories can have unlimited depth, though I want to improve this system later ( i.e. Parent >> Child >> Child 2)
- Permissions, who can add edit delete etc (Publisher, Contributor, Editor)
- Plugin calls for onBeforeSave and onAfterSave to make it pluggable, will perhaps add others if required
Would it be useful for people to select the usergroup for content to be displayed to, so that you can have private, and therefore premium articles?
What I plan on adding
- Module management
- This will be for the front page, and not for the forum pages, though I may do something with this later.
At this time the plan for beta release is to have module management working whereby you can add custom HTML content, or PHP pages that can get included in. You will have the ability to add as many module positions as you like and define them in the template, the admin side will then let you pull in the modules that you want into those positions.
The intent at the moment for this is to be a basic CMS, more than anything just a content delivery system. I am tired of having integrated systems and need to do a lot of development to get myself to a newer version of Joomla so figure I may as well do that development on a unified system.
Dan
Looks like a great start:
Would it be useful for people to select the usergroup for content to be displayed to, so that you can have private, and therefore premium articles?
Yes.
Sweet I will write that into it so there is a multi-select list of access, default is "everyone"
havent had a chance to work on it this week like I had hopes but should be a more rapid build from here, the biggest hurdle is going to be handling module management and creation. first release will be basic, but hoping to add a more advanced way of doing dynamic modules through a pluggable interface
I have been offline for a while or more or less with my wife away in hospital and me taking care of our daughter. She is still in hospital but I have flown down with my daughter to my parents so that someone can care for my daughter whilst I work.
This means I don't have a lot of spare net time at the moment, but I am trying to write little bits of the code in lunch breaks and when a moment arises.
I have completed everything but block management for the backend, so am going to start on that task within the next hour or so. Once that is done, the rest should be a fairly rapid development process.
Remember this is not being designed to be a be all and end all CMS more another way of delivering content and managing your site through a single platform.
Once I am ready with a beta release I will let you all know and look for testers. I plan on just releasing this for free with the option for donations, but the determining factor on my continued use of it will be if it both suits my needs as well as time permitting, happy to have others do some development too
Actually looking for some feedback on whether this seems a decent way to handle block management
- Define block "Areas" within admin
- Assign blocks to those areas
- Define the output placement of those "Areas" in a template
- Blocks are simple php scripts accompanied by an XML file that are picked up by the system, brought into the database and enabled through block management
- All block php and coding is standard mybb stuff and brought in and eval'd like everything else
- All block contain their own HTML and aren't templated separately, though I guess that could be decided by the block authors
What are your thoughts on those, is there anything you would change or add?
I am thinking adding multiple tables just to handle block areas seems a waste and a waste of a call so I am going to think on this for a while. Grabbing them without defining them in a table on the content page is not a problem its more handling them in the back-end that becomes an issue
Shouldnt be far off completion and ready for alpha/beta release very soon.
Have finished all of the back-end stuff for content and block management and am currently creating the front-page and templates.
Once I have done that I will make a few sample blocks for example use, one just plain HTML and one using the database and mybb Settings
Blocks work like standard plugins, you create the block completely as a plugin and then create an output for it, and that is called by the content blocks page. You can define as many block areas as you want, there is no limit currently, you can then place a block within any single content area you want.
This means that on the content pages you can call in whatever blocks you want, meaning you can create navigation areas, content blocks and all sorts of stuff.
I still don't think anyone is going to use the plugin but its more or less a proof of concept for me
Sweet. I want to at least get to release on this the reason I am creating it is to see if I can replace joomla for the article side of things and then if I can I can build a whole lot of other stuff onto it.
Once I release beta and fix bugs ill get to release and start adding features from there.
I need this at release before January and then need to port over other things like tipping comps before match next year if this is robust enough.
My site has approx 3000 articles on it so I am going to bring them all over from joomla and test how robust my code is. If it borked a little on that I'm going to work on a proper archive where articles archived goes to another archive table meaning recent content is faster.
Anyway I'm building the front page still and trying to make it as extensible as possible for people and all a matte of ten playing to achieve what people want
I wanted to apologise for my delay in this. I have been through personal hell since October in my life.
Basically I went from having this at 90% ready for beta release to not touching it in that time. I wanted to have it ready by January at the latest.
With that said, whilst everything isn't back to 100% normal my life has stabilised a lot and I want to start working on this again.
Hopefully I can get a beta out soon though I am due to be on holidays for most of March. I will see what I can do and may get others to assist if required.
Dan
Best of luck and speedy recovery!
