After years and years of using, learning and building a CMS this is the 5th time, and not the last time I am going to be starting fresh.
Why:
Technology has changed, I have learn’t more. its getting to be that time.
I am taking almost everything from the stable cms I have been running and building sites in for the last few years, it is awesomely powerful, while still so easy to use, so why rebuilt it?
Because it deserves to be better.
Weekly we make changes to the system, refinements here and there, and while I am trying to reduce these now to the minimum we are at the point that to keep the system clean, it needs to be started fresh.
Where to start:
Still using CodeIgnighter for the core, but this time splitting the admin and front end in to two projects.
There will be shared functions and classes to the setup goes a little like this:
-docroot
– www/
– index.php
– assets/
– application/
– system ( core CI )
– shared/
– admin/
– index.php
– assets/
– application/
Stage one:
Authentication.
I have rewritten both the database structure and code from the ground up, the old way was Okay, but not enough control on permissions/sessions/modules. The new way, more control than you can shake a stick at, more thought put in place. doing more checks and making a starter go at loggin in good users, keeping out bad users, setting permissions and access to everything required.
Stage two:
Content.
The key to every CMS and website is content right. while our existing system is kick-ass easy at adding and editing pages, this is going to be a bit smarter at letting you focus on the important pieces.
– Permalinks revisited.
I’m doing research right now on generating the best url for the page, incorporating parts of the parent url if relevant, removed dud words like ‘a’ and ‘and’ or ‘or’.
I found this good, so am taking it in to my thoughts when building this urls:
If you can make your title four- or five-words long – and it is pretty natural. If you have got a three, four or five words in your URL, that can be perfectly normal. As it gets a little longer, then it starts to look a little worse. Now, our algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.
here is my url clean function:
I’m open to suggestions here, I am prepending all parent permalinks in from before passing into this function, but feel safe that i limit 2 three levels of navigation, so this shouldn’t be toooo naaaasty…
< ?php
// example page title 'Chocolate Lolli-Pops' with a Parent of 'Our Range of Services' ( our-range-services ).
$title = 'Chocolate Lolli-Pops';
$parent = 'our-range-services';
$slug = $parent .'/'. $title;
$url = create_permalink($slug);
function global_ignore_words() {
return array('a','an','as','at','before','but','by','for','from','is','in','into','like','of','off','on','onto','per','since','than','the','this','that','to','up','via','with', 'gajshost', 'the', 'to', 'their', 'of', 'a', 'be' ,'and','is','in','or','that','for','will','over','as','when','on','can','with','your','are','at','not','you','using','each','end','this','used','may','by','if','any','same','gap','an','it','use','being','allow','side','so','we','long','edge','have','make','ends','occur','down','up','run','from','all','one','amp','fix','do','them','more','need','out','off','must','than');
}
function create_permalink($str = '') {
// strip tags in case
$str = strip_tags($str);
// ignore these silly words...
$global_ignore = global_ignore_words();
// make url safe
$trans = array(
'&\#\d+?;' => '',
'&\S+?;' => '',
'\s+' => '-',
'[^a-z0-9\-\._]' => '',
'-+' => '-',
'-$' => '-',
'^-' => '-',
'\.+$' => ''
);
foreach($trans as $key => $val) {
$str = preg_replace("#".$key."#i", $val, $str);
}
// replace out the ignore words, make sure its full words.
foreach ($global_ignore as $word) {
$str = str_replace('-'.$word.'-', '-', $str);
}
// remove anythign else we dont want
$special_chars = array("?", "[", "]", "/", "\\", "=", "< ", ">", ":", ";", ",", "'", "\"", "&", "$", "#", "*", "(", ")", "|", "~", "`", "!", "{", "}");
$str = str_replace($special_chars, '', $str);
$str = preg_replace('/[\s-]+/', '-', $str);
// remove multilple spaces and full stops.
$search = array('-----','----','---','--','.');
$replace = '-';
$str = str_replace($search, $replace, $str);
// now remove any other short words..
$str = explode('-', $str);
foreach($str as $k => $word) {
if(strlen($word) < 3) unset($slug[$k]);
}
$str = implode('-', $str);
// finaly, clear, lower and return
$str = trim($str, '.-_');
return strtolower($str);
}
With this in mind I'm saving the page title, placement ( once was parent ), template and nice shiny new permalink.
