Re: Creating a custom e-shop and CMS solution; flexibility versus complexity
- From: hug <contact_info@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 07:16:37 -0700
"Robin" <prefixy@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hello webdevelopers!
I am currently looking for the best solution to provide our employer
with a flexible e-shop and custom CMS in one. We have been checking out
different development architectures, portals and cms-systems to do the
job. We found out that the flexibility of portals and content
management systems are insufficient when it comes to modifying the
layout. We found out that CMS systems like 'Joomla!' use
'templates' to define sections. With an administrative interface
one can assign names to these sections. After that, an item (or
component) can be coupled, or added to the predefined section.
I think this is not the most convenient way for website designers to
modify the layout of a website. And since our website will be more
liable for layout changes than for adding different types of content,
we think the flexibility of being able to modify the layout is more
important than the ability to add different kinds of content. Thereby
the administrative interface should be simple to use. Note that no
e-shop functionalities should be added to the administrative interface
(since this will be handled by an external application). Thereby we
don't want to add functionalities to add these section to the website
dynamically (since adding these features will be time consuming and
inefficient since the websites' layout will not change that much) .
We think that the features of most CMS's are too advanced, and will
give our users a hard time to understand. At the other hand, using a
more simple CMS, will make the websites' layout less transparent.
We were thinking to create a solid 'model-view-controller'
object-oriented solution. By doing so, we want to be able to add the
different kind of sections to the website's layout in a relative easy
way. We don't want to add administrative functionalities to embed
these sections dynamically. We just want to create an 'interfacing
framework', that designers can use to implement the different
sections on the website in an easy way. It's important to take into
account that some sections or modules should be able to interact with
each other.
We don't fear the use of modern technologies like XHTML or Ajax. The
only limitation is that we should be using technologies that are
licensed under GPL.
I was thinking of creating a centralized posthandler which can control
the content of the websites' sections using PHP. But on the other
hand, I think that creating a singleton object that controls,
controllers, models and views, is not the way to do it.
Any ideas and suggestions are welcome!
You need to think about some more things. How soon do you need to get
your solution up and running? How many people will be working on it?
How much time will you spend on maintenance? How ill-fitting are the
existing solutions, really? How generalized does your solution really
need to be?
Creating a custom ecommerce site with CMS isn't a trivial undertaking,
there's more to it than meets the eye. In some ways I miss the
corporate umbrella under which a team can sit for a few years
developing something wonderful. If that's your situation, you can
have a lot of fun with it. If it isn't, you might want to consider
approaches that don't constitute a major development effort.
--
http://www.ren-prod-inc.com/hug_soft/store.php?action=contact
.
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