as-yet-unnamed cms

I've frequently found myself making little websites for various companies or other purposes. These sites usually need a unified look and feel, a straight-forward directory structure, customer-editable pages, and some interaction with a database. For each of these sites, I've had to address the same problems in slightly different ways.

I've looked into the many content management systems available, but most either don't do what I need or do so much more than what I need that they're just too complex.

So, naturally, I'm writing my own.

The idea is that somebody can come to this with a knowledge of PHP and pretty much just use that without having to learn a whole new system. The developer creates templates using native PHP, and in those templates uses a simple syntax to declare variables for whatever he wants the customer to be able to edit. Then he puts those variables as PHP variables anywhere in the template he desires. The pages that use these templates just assign values to these variables. The customer goes to a script that reads the template associated with a page and shows an edit box for each variable declared by the template (or by any templates the template itself includes).

The other major function is the easy creation of database interaction. The developer goes to a page where he can specify the fields he wants in a database structure and what their relationship is (one-to-one, many-to-one, or many-to-many). The script then generates the tables themselves, add/edit/delete pages for entries, and boilerplate SQL queries. The developer can use the generic add/edit/delete pages or make his own, and he can use the boilerplate queries or make his own. The results of the queries are stuck into results templates and then assigned to one of the variables declared by the template.

So far it's about a third of the way there.

cms.tgz