On Fri, 2011-09-30 at 14:35 -0400, Marc Guay wrote: > Howdy, > > I'm looking for a FOSS equivalent to PHPMaker, or at least something > which comes close to it. For those who don't know the program, it > syncs with your database and allows you to generate an entire CMS > system based on it. To be clear, I am not looking for a CRUD code > generator, I'm looking for something that can generate the whole > shabang so I can get on with it. > > Perhaps someone could sassily tell me why I don't need this tool or > propose another method, that would be good too. I really enjoy > building sites up from the DB schema but hate creating web interfaces > for editing them. I've also taken a stab at Drupal, which is like > doing it the other way around, using the CMS to create the schema, but > a lot of the time it seems ass backwards and I'm not in the mood to > get another hand cramp from clicking through the interface for 6 hours > setting everything up. > > Marc > It sounds like what you're looking is an ORM system. We're trying out using a plugin for the CodeIgniter framework at the moment called Bonfire (http://cibonfire.com/) which aims to build a basic CMS around the DB model. I've not used it myself, but a colleague is. He's said that it's basic, and only in alpha at the moment, but to me it does look potentially promising. The Cake framework does revolve around its DB schema, and enforces certain rules for relations between the tables (without having to create foreign keys, it simulates a kind of 'soft' foreign key through the code). That said, Cake is pretty huge and slow compared to CodeIgniter. -- Thanks, Ash http://www.ashleysheridan.co.uk
