For quite a long time now, I've been trying to write and have been in search of "a really good" CRUD application. Don't get me wrong - I didn't say "The ultimate" CRUD application. Just one that could be rated 1st class.
What I'm saying is: Please don't respond to this plea with an answer like "Well, every situation is different..."
Q: Is there a blog post or something in the Adobe documentation that shows CRUD on a one-to-many relationship (Header/Detail), that uses web standards css (instead of tables), that uses best practices (CF9 has changed so many things now: scripted components, ORM), that uses the latest UI techniques (jQuery or some of the built-in AJAX features of CF9), that has a nice front-end (a nice looking header and background along with some pretty buttons)?
I know that's a lot to ask, but such is my quest.
A good example of a one-to-many relationship is the city/state xml files built into the Spry examples. There are 23,000 cities in the sample xml files, so I think that's better than just using random data.
I'm not really sure what you're asking, but I just want to respond to a couple of points in your question (this is more a comment than an answer, but since SO is stupidly limited in this, I'll put it here instead.)
that uses web standards css (instead of tables),
There is no "css instead of tables" - they are two distinct and compatible things!
CSS describes visual aspects of a document, whilst tables markup tabular data.
If you're displaying tabular data, then tables is exactly what you should be using, and you can use CSS to make it look more exciting than the plain styles that tables come in.
Since you're asking for a CRUD app, odds are you are going to be wanting to display tabular data so should be using tables.
(The common mistake people make is not understanding the nature of the web, and using tables to apply grid layouts to documents, when they should be using strucuted semantic markup instead.)
that uses best practices (CF9 has changed so many things now:
scripted components, ORM)
Scripted components are not a best practise!
They are an alternative syntax (for people that prefer having non-descriptive braces everywhere) they do not offer anything you can't already do.
i would strongly suggest you check out cfwheels. read the documentation, it's built for doing such crud applications and has an amazing set of features and will save you a lot of time. as for the interface, there are many jquery plugins out there that can handle this. i suggest looking at ajaxrain and find a plugin you like
Related
I am currently developing a website. I would like to separate content and presentation. I am currently using a Dreamweaver Template to achieve this. However, I find that Dreamweaver's edit regions are very limiting in the design view. I have found that the same goal can be achieved by including the header and footer of my website.
What are the pros and cons of using includes rather than using templates?
First, if I were to rephrase your question, it's more like asking "Should I by a wire frame of a kite or by the glue to stick together what I'm making?" And then, you ask about the pros and cons of buying the wireframe against buying the glue. There are far too many variables as you can see...
And back on your your question... At some point your template will use include files. And for a start, it's worth knowing what you're thinking... Let's look at some basics.
Web design - usually refers to making websites that aren't really interactive. They don't have server-side elements. So most of the site has 'static' contents. If this were the case, you're better off with DreamWeaver, particularly if you're not into html/css editing.
Web development/programming - starts off with something as elementary as mailing a form, to highly interactive sites like FaceBook. Here you'll need to use some server-side language, usually like PHP, ASP or JSP. The choices are many but you've got to choose your own platform or combination of them.
Now to the second option (above). If for example, you were building a site using PHP, one of the nice things you'll do is to include your header, footer and side panels that need to be repeated across all pages. This way, you'll eliminate the need to re-write those sections. But if you were using a program like DreamWeaver, it does this duplication for you. Yes, it physically copy-pastes those sections into every file that needs it. Of course the end result may not be any different. But as a developer, you will be tied down to the DreamWeaver platform or for that matter, any other specific platform.
On the other hand, if you get used to working with an editor like NotePad++ or GEdit, you may switch between editors at any time. But you have the task of hand-coding everything from scratch. But then again, since you would use include files to bring in your headers and stuff, you save development time as well.
I don't know how much of html/css or php you know, but here's one of my demos to show you how to hand-code a site. This ain't complete but you should get an idea.
Link to the video introduction
Link to the video on youtube
I am a computer programmer by training but have been away from web development for a while. I am doing a little bit of background research on various Python web development frameworks. I understand that Django, Grok / Zope 3, and Pylons are all good solid frameworks, but have little in the way of background working with them. Can someone explain to me the difference in approach of the each of the frameworks, and where one shines when compared to the others?
My specific use case is in building a web application that will recommend products to users based on a variety of user supplied information. Thus, it will take a fair bit of user input in the shape of a basic profile, product preferences, attempt to establish social relationships between users. It will also need to support staff uploading products into the system with labeled features that can be then matched to users.
On the last point, would parts of Plone help with providing an interface for non-tech people to upload products and descriptions of the products? Are piece of Plone easy to borrow? Seems like I shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel in terms of having a way for people to upload items for sale / recommendation along with some metadata to describe the items. Thanks for the help.
Based on your background and requirements, I'd advise you to go with something like http://pinaxproject.com/ which is based on Django.
Pyramid (the successor to Pylons) is a very low-level framework and you need to either choose the libraries or write all your application code yourself. For someone experienced this makes sense and gives you full control over your code. But it is a bit of a hurdle if you start from scratch and aren't familiar with the available libraries.
Django and Grok are both high level frameworks, with Django being the more popular choice. If you aren't familiar yet with using object databases or URL traversal, Grok is more time consuming to learn.
Plone is not suited for your use-case. It's a content management system and not a general web framework. Very little of the libraries it uses can be reused in a different context, certainly none of its UI. If you want to provide an engaging user experience with personalized content, Plone isn't for you - that's not what its been build to handle.
Disclaimer: I'm a release manager for Plone and Zope 2 / Zope Toolkit and have used Pyramid but not Django.
Dolmen project is a CMS built on top of Grok. Is very simple, but there are very few that use it. If you go with Grok, you could be able to reuse the GUI.
But As Hanno said, Grok is more time-consuming to learn than Django. Also Django has far more users than Grok.
The advantage of using Grok is that you can profit from Zope Component Architecture almost without writing ZCML and using decorators instead.
With Pyramid/Pylons you get a very simple framework and nothing else. It is a decoupled framework, so you are free to use whatever templating enginge you want (Mako, Genshi, Jinja, Cheetah), you are free to choose sqlalchemy, zodb, mongoDb, etc., and you are also free to choose the url mapping scheme (traversal vs. django-style mapping or a combination of both). You can also use ZCA here if you want. For starters this might become quite confusing or verbose.
Django is a kind of monolithic framework that gives you one way to do stuff. That's why it's easy to learn and a very good option. But, in my experience, you sometimes get to a point where you want to deviate from Django standards and it simply cannot be done without patching a bunch of stuff.
And, as for Zope3, I'd recommend you to download a copy of BlueBream and se how it does for you.
As a Plone user I can say that creating Content Objects in Plone is difficult. There is not much documentation on how to do it and it is complicated. Some recommend using UML and specialized Plone products to make it easier but that introduces yet another dependency.
I mention the problem with content objects because your "products" (not the same as a Plone product) would probably be represented in Plone as a content object which you would need to write yourself.
Plone is best when users and editors are entering and approving text in the form of news articles, press releases, photos etc. When that is the use case there are predefined content objects for such things so one does not need to write them oneself.
--Jonathan Mark
I'm developing a web portal that mostly works like a newspaper site. In the focus, there are articles, containing text, videos and images. These articles have attachments which shall be presented in a sidebar. These attachments might be the same objects that will be displayed within the body text.
I have been thinking a lot about how to create the structure and - and this is a major point - how to enable the editor to edit all this stuff comfortably.
What I evaluated were Django-CMS and feincms as complete systems, and several third-party-modules that do snippets of the work.
Now, I a have solution for inline objects: I forked the inline-module of django-basic-apps which is now able to take additional parameters for the objects to embed. Their parameters are an important thing to e.g. embed "an image with object id x, but max x pixels in size".
What is not solved with my approach is, to generate a sidebar containing a bunch of inline tokens. I could create a custom widget for this, though. A better solution would surely be to add a functionaly like somehow attaching generic objects (videos, images...) to an article object.
While my solution is working so far, I'm not sure if there are other ways to solve these common scenario, and I would like to hear some other experiences about this topic, and if there are any other ways you deal with it.
For there does not seem to be a bigger need of a solution for this generic problem, I will use my solution and see whether it proves in practice.
Take a look at Armstrong CMS. It's specifically designed to meet the needs of news organizations. It was developed out of the code that powers The Texas Tribune, a very large Django news site that won the Edward R. Murrow Award for best local news website in 2010.
Armstrong scales very well, is fast and can handle just about any kind of content you want to throw at it.
Not a programming question I'm afraid, so moderators do what you will, but it is a question specifically for self-employed programmers running their own ISV sites.
If you publish your own shareware or freeware, do you use any CMS or templating system to streamline maintaining the website? Would you recommend any?
Two most important features I'm looking for that I couldn't find in any popular CMS/blogging engine, from my favorite TextPattern to WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are:
a templating system to maintain structural consistency of xhtml page layout
a hash table of user-defined values that works with the templates to substitute these values for identifiers.
Explanation: If you publish more than one application, the site probably contains several classes of pages that are nearly identical for each product: "Features", "Screenshots", "What's new", "Download", etc. These pages have the same layout and differ mainly in product-specific data. I'd like to be able to define "CurrentVersion=2.2" for product A, and "CurrentVersion=3.3" for product B in a "dictionary", and have the system generate two "Download" pages from the same template, replacing the "CurrentVersion" identifier with each product's respective value.
Other than that, I am looking for good support for static pages (the example pages above do not yield themselves to blog-like timeline treatment) and for design templates (themes), since I can't do graphic design at all (no skills, no tools, no talent). A good search function, esp. for the FAQs, is important. Another nice-to-have is easy (preferably wiki-like) way of linking to pages within the site. Some CMS-es, such as Joomla, make this simple and common task surprisingly inconvenient.
LAMP, and preferably free, since mine is a freeware-only shop.
I need no collaboration features and no multi-user content editing at all. My ISP doesn't support Zope, so that excludes some candidates.
I'm asking this question having spent months trying to find a solution that would help me leave static html behind and reduce the maintenance chores, such as updating the current version number on several pages manually. So what do others use to publish their software?
(Please do not reply by just saying "Try X". At least please say what makes it suitable or how it is better than other possible solutions. I've already tried a number of CMS engines, and they all seem to require extensive modifications to suit this particular need. Since my programming experience is strictly desktop-side Windows, tweaking these products is well beyond my skills (and my skin crawls to think of potential security WTFs I could unwittingly commit). Time is also a factor, since between my day job and my late-night coding, there's little left for learning how to write my own CMS from scratch - just typing static html would be more efficient.)
Wordpress is quite nice. It has a big community behind it so you can leech some plugins, like for SEO optimization, PayPal integration, Google Analytics statistics tracking, etc. And you also have a full-featured administration backend to manage all your content.
I would recommend Joomla 3.2.x. I have the same sort of project based websites, and this provides the flexibility for all of the different requirements. While WordPress is great the simplicity of it gets the better of it, Joomla is far more flexible and has a huge support network and extensions library.
First, some background information... I'm coming up on a medium-scale website for a non-profit that will require both English and Korean translations. Feature-set includes: CMS for normal content, a blog, some form submission/handling (including CSV/PDF exports), a job posting board, a directory of related businesses and non-profits (that accepts visitor submissions), and a basic (probably blog-driven) newsroom.
I have a fairly strong development background, and I've done some sites using Drupal, built some basic custom CMSes using frameworks like CodeIgniter, and I've recently started getting into Django. These are the primary options that I am exploring, and I would consider using different tools for different portions of the project, but what I'm mainly interested in, is if anyone has any experience to share with regards to localization/internationalization. I haven't yet put together a site that supports multiple languages, so before I get in trouble by underestimating the task, or making poor assumptions, I'd like to get some input to help guide my decision-making process.
Do you have any recommendations for frameworks (Drupal, Django, CodeIgniter) that handle localization/internationalization/translation well for a CMS? I know they all support it, but I'm looking for real-world experience here (or suggestions for modules/plugins given explanations).
Sorry for the longwinded question, but I wanted to be clear as possible. Thanks in advance!
There is a distinction between "site" translation and content translation. Django handles the site translation great, out of the box. The content translation, however, requires making some decisions (there's no one right way at this point). This probably makes sense, because of the very nature of Django as a lower level framework (when compared to something like Drupal, which is intended to serve as a complete CMS).
There are applications for Django which are meant to add this functionality (in the form of translations configured at the model level):
Django-multilingual
Transmeta
Also, I found this question that is related.
The bottom line though, is that this is still being explored in the Django world, and neither approach has been decided upon for the framework. Also, although I haven't used it, Drupal has module support for this in the form of the i18n module.
I will update with more conclusions as I come to them. If you have anything to add about content translation in Django or in Drupal, feel free to add your own answer as well.
You probably already know that the native i18n support in django is quite good. As for translation, you might try the django-rosetta app which allows you to grant translation rights to a subset of users, who are then able to translate through an admin-like interface.
Zend_Translate is pretty comprehensive. And if you decide to use PHP, I suggest you take a look at it. It provides multiple interfaces (e.g. an Array, CSV, Gettext, etc.) to manage your translations, which makes it IMHO unmatched when it comes to PHP.
I'm not sure how well it plays with Drupal, since Drupal is hardly a framework but more a CMS -- or maybe a CMS framework. I'm pretty sure that Drupal either has a thing build in or that there is a plugin for it.
With CodeIgniter you would start from scratch and Zend_Translate plays well with it.
I liked Drupal over Joomla. You should also look into DotNetNuke, out of the box it has lot of things that will meet your needs.
Checkout django-blocks. Has multi-language Menu, Flatpages and even has a simple Shopping Cart!!