I'm the central developer for a univeristy division. For the past
three
months I've been developing a CMS with Zend Framework. It has gone
very
well and has had good feed back. There are many departments that
want to
come on board as well as campuses in other cities. It answers a lot
of the
interoperability problems with languages, databases etc within the
university. I did a seminar on it today and now have a core group of
developers who are interested in pushing it further.
Problem is: a college just showed me mysource Matrix, which is the
competition. Have I just wasted the past three months? It already does
everything I'm developing, and if it does not, it can be extended /
developed. It already has huge buy in from governments and education
departments.
- Why would anyone develop a CMS in Zend Framework?
Well for one thing it really depends what you mean by CMS. CMS or
content management system is a very general term for what includes a
huge variation of approaches. Usually you have a key set of
requirements that are the deciding factor such as for example; it
needs to have a clear and separate templating setup as you'll be
working with a team of designers; it needs to meet governmental
accessibility standards so needs to be able to output valid HTML,
etc; It needs to be available under a certain license; and many other
reasons.
In the case of a current project I'm working on for an Australian
University: While it has content management components it also has
specific requirements that move it into being a custom solution. If I
was to choose a pre-existing solution I'd more than likely need to be
coding around pre-existing components as soon as the client
determines that they want something to be this way or that way.
Almost all projects swell beyond their initial requirements so not
only do you have the increased bulk of your own/your team's code but
you also have the bulk of the pre-existing components.
- What advantages does Zend Framework have over Mysource Matrix for
producing RIAs?
I'm not familiar enough with Mysource Matrix to answer but that's a
bit of an apples and oranges question since the latter is a CMS and
the former is a tool you could use to build a CMS.
- Are there any other Zend Framework developers that would be
interested in
collaborating to create a professional open source Zend Framework CMS?
(Built on the Zend Classes it could grow very quickly, and we are
off to a
good start).
- Or should I accept defeat, and if so can the framework integrate
with
mysource matrix?
It's not clear why you feel any sense of defeat really. You say your
work has been well received but have perhaps been shown this pre-
existing solution and felt you had to justify all the extra time that
building your own is going to require?
If you have a "core group of developers who are interested in pushing
it further" then that is a great thing. One of the more difficult
issues is finding developers aside from yourself to work on existing
code. One benefit ZF provides is as a common language that developers
can use without tying them into one solution. Ask yourself how many
PHP developers you expect to be available who know mySourceMatrix in
3 years versus ones who will be familiar with ZF considering it's
backing.
You don't mention how much you've investigated the code of mySource
Matrix. I usually find that my choices are made very clear as soon as
I download the code and poke around a bit.
I could go on and on here really but I'll stop there as well ...I
should be working on a part CMS built with ZF ;)
Nick
