Building a Custom CMS from scratch, let me know what you think.

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SBSP

Senior Member
Joined
Sep 7, 2007
Messages
663
I used to have a Joomla based website and it was ok for what I needed back then. But now I need something more custom which I have full control of. Initially the idea sounded simple in my head, but it turned out to be allot of work.

The problem with self build websites with mail, admin maintenance, forgot passwords ect ect are, If you are going to put in allot of work you better good at it otherwise you are going to be wasting allot of time because the competition out there is quite hectic not to mention the security and SEO issues that comes with custom sites. I put in allot of work and usually when I come close to the end I end up ditching it because it didn't turn out as well as i initially thought it would.

So now I'm there at the end of it and again doubting my work, maybe its because Ive been working and looking too much at it. :D

Besides the google ads on it , I'm not making real money out of this, I think I have R750 in my google account which I gathered over a period of about 10 years. Please don't tell me to get a real developer to this for me.

Its not my first CMS I built a T-Shirt Shop which I don't support or even use myself, I ended up not using it and made it available as a totally free download.

I'm also not a web developer for a living I just do as a hobby.

Without telling you what the site is about (If you cant figure it out then I have done a bad job at it)

Please tell me what you think

Recommended changes will be highly appreciated.

There are a few rookie issues like
Images that are stretched instead of scaled - I haven't figured out how to crop images so the stay the same size yet.

File Uploads is working okish but is a bit primitive.

No AJAX! allot of page refreshes = slow

Some elements become visible whilst loading, only when the loading is do will it jump into place, not sure how to get around it yet.

Security is not quite want I want it to be, I'm very afraid of code injection and I'm over filtering some characters which kind of preventing me to implement certain features like code highlighting ect ect.

Thanks for taking the time.
 
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rward

Senior Member
Joined
Oct 26, 2007
Messages
865
If you're worried about security and best practices then check out OWASP - The Open Web Application Security Project and stuff like https://www.fishnetsecurity.com/6la...best-practices-secure-forgot-password-feature

Is there any reason you're not using an existing CMS?
Why not find one you like and contribute towards it instead of creating your own that, as you said, " I put in allot of work and usually when I come close to the end I end up ditching it because it didn't turn out as well as i initially thought it would."

At least with a known CMS you will have other developers to bounce ideas and code off. They can also assist you where/when needed, helping you grow too.

You say that you're not a developer but I think that having done a project or two like this, you are one.
 
Thor

Thor

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44,236
Not Mobile friendly unfortunately.
 

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dadecoza

dadecoza

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Aug 30, 2006
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1,294
You actually did a pretty decent job. When I read your post a really thought it was going to be crap. :p

Except for the mobile rendering it looks like a proper professional site (nothing that wp can't do though :p).
 
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S

SBSP

Senior Member
Joined
Sep 7, 2007
Messages
663
Thor187 said:
I didn't bad mouth just said it's not Mobile unfortunately, which should be a first priority today.

Mobile search overtook desktop search
Click to expand...

No worries :)

dade said:
You actually did a pretty decent job. When I read your post a really thought it was going to be crap. :p

Except for the mobile rendering it looks like a proper professional site (nothing that wp can't do though :p).
Click to expand...

Thanks, I tried to be moddest, because if you come a across as a "Brag-gat" then people tend prove you wrong in every way they can :)
the front page looks nice but once you start to use the "Creator studio" to create a project you will quickly see what I'm talking about.
Bootstrap does all the "making it look good" work for you.


Thanks for the comments so far
The mobile friendliness problem has been fixed now , The other day I tried it on my ipad and assumed it will work on a phone.
I forgot to add bootstrap's class="img-responsive"
 
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S

SBSP

Senior Member
Joined
Sep 7, 2007
Messages
663
Ok wait there are more pages which wont display properly using a mobile device, Will fix those aswell.
 
Thor

Thor

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Now that's nice!!
 

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neo_

neo_

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May 20, 2015
Messages
453
If you're looking for a CMS that gives you fine-grained control over pretty much everything, then it would be worth your while checking out ProcessWire. It's a cross between a content management framework and system (CMF/CMS), and has a lot of features that common systems lack. Bit of a learning curve, but once you catch on, it's easy as pie.
 
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NullHypothesis

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Joined
Nov 20, 2015
Messages
363
I often publish DIY guides online. I have thought about the CMS before and have always reverted back to modifying WordPress. I have written about my thought process about planning such a site here and here. But back to the CMS, when the CMS is not your core business it is unwise to recreate the wheel, NewsTilt being the cautionary tale.

Lesson: If you think you should build it, not buy it, you’re wrong

We built our whole platform ourselves. Now, we used lots of scaffolding, built on Rails, hosted at Heroku, using every plugin we could find. I reasoned that the platform was the core of our technology, and we were a technology company, and smart technology companies needed the flexibility that comes from writing the core of their platform themselves. In retrospect, this could only be considered premature optimization.

The natural thing to do was build on WordPress instead, but I wasn’t having any of it. The major problem with WordPress is that it’s written in PHP. I hated PHP with a passion, and couldn’t fathom building my company on it. How would we attract good developers? How could we live with ourselves?

Really, I shouldn’t have worried. It was far more important to just get it built, and nothing could have helped that more than just using WordPress. We could easily have given journalists distinctive styles, so they didn’t feel like they were writing for us, and we could have built things really quickly by just plugging them together
Click to expand...
 
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NullHypothesis

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By the way title says "TechTinkerDocs.com" a domain that is still available.
 
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