What is SkoopCMS all about?
It is about "Creating a high-performance modular object oriented PHP CMS". As simple as that.
So what is the purpose of this tutorial? It sketches a working solution for a modular application framework using Object Oriented PHP. We could call SkoopCMS a WAF (Web Application Framework) but people know "CMS" better. The key ideas of SkoopCMS are
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Separation of display from control logic - use templates
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Minimalism - the less code you need the fewer problems
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Utterly lightweight and fast compared to almost any CMS
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'Collector templates' that contain the display logic
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Extendibility - write new modules with ease
What do you need to know
First things first: If you are not a developer and only interested in having something like this installed or have some training please
contact us.
If you are a developer and want to use it or develop these ideas further, you need to know
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how to write PHP code in an object oriented manner.
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HTML or preferably XHTML
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some CSS
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some JavaScript
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the basics of SQL and how to use MySQL from PHP
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the basics of a Web server and you should have one available
If you have no idea about objects and how to use them you may still get the idea as this is far from an academic approach. Writing a CMS without objects is possible but maintaining and refactoring it will be a nightmare.
Issues covered
We will concentrate on the basic ideas of a simple CMS, building and coupling modules and templates. Database functionality will be retained as simple as possible. We will also have a look at some simple AJAX spices.
As for security we will have a look at only the simplest measures to filter out the most obvious hacking attempts. If you want to create an ultimately safe system you will have to do a lot more research on the subject. On the other hand there are hundreds of thousands of live websites less secure than our humble creation.
What about HTML5?
We will not yet touch the overhyped
HTML5 - at least in the start phase. There will be but few major differences in between XHTML and HTML5 and all of them are simply additions. Moreover, HTML5 is not a standard yet - not even a final proposal of its functionality is written. In some parts of the world less than 50% of browsers used support the current idea of HTML5. We have on ongoing project to document facts about HTML5
here.
Other thoughts
This is a
collection of ideas, not a designer's or a programmer's tutorial. The PHP code has a kind-of-a
RISC (reduced instruction set computer) paradigm which will result on easy-to-read code and good performance.
Please note that we have omitted the trailing php end tag ?> on purpose as it is the recommended way today.
As for MVC It is possible that a more MVC-orthodox tutorial will be released some time in the future. We will, however, try to avoid the overabundance of nested classes in the core of the system. We know where deep inheritance would lead.
Anyhow, all corrections to he layout and the code are welcome.
The name "SkoopCMS"
There was no good reason for using the original name which was "SpookyCMS". Aiming at World Domination in Content Management we decided to change it to something more suitable for our purposes :-)
