My own CMS

[Kezzer]

Well i've been juggling between the decision whether to use a pre-made CMS or make my own. Since i've just finished all my exams i have quite a bit of time on my hands now so i've deciced to make my own. The reason being is that it can be specific to my needs and i'll know how to use it etc.

Now, here's what i want from it.

Areas - about, contact page etc.
Blog - you can guess
Articles - just tutorials/articles really
Project logs - i'll be working on some projects (proper ones) soon

Now i'll have a user system so i can login to an admin page and then add the info that i want. This means i'll have to link tables I suppose?

So i'll login, then i'll be able to add info to the blog, the articles and the project logs and other areas as well as edit them or delete them. This is quite basic really but i just need to know how to do the database mainly.

The user table would link to all other tables i suspect?

Can anyone give me any insight on what to do from that information?

Cheers

[welly]

Yeah, basically a one-to-many relationship on the blogs, articles and project tables.

[ozzyo99]

You need to take an orthadox object orientated system (OO-S) approach if you want you project to be successful, this would involve:

User requirement spec. - What do you want it for/to do?
Use case diagram - Admin/User interactions
Class diagram - Functional interaction

After you have worked all that out, you can then make a real stab at your system and will at this point have a complete idea and goal as to how to undertake the project. Doing in 2 footed will result in cock-ups down the line which will be a lot more complex once data is entered to the database (Access 2003?).

[Kezzer]

You need to take an orthadox object orientated system (OO-S) approach if you want you project to be successful, this would involve:

User requirement spec. - What do you want it for/to do?
Use case diagram - Admin/User interactions
Class diagram - Functional interaction

After you have worked all that out, you can then make a real stab at your system and will at this point have a complete idea and goal as to how to undertake the project. Doing in 2 footed will result in cock-ups down the line which will be a lot more complex once data is entered to the database (Access 2003?).

I've done database management before, i know about planning etc

Access, no thanks!

[ozzyo99]

Access is actually a very good program, but ok

[Kezzer]

I did a course with access for 3 gruelling months. I hated it :S It's nowhere near as good as mySQL and other decent databases. It can't handle as many entries as SQL and so forth.

I'm just planning it out now, will post a pic of the layout soon

[Kezzer]

EDIT: Removed image

That's the plan so far. Basically you need to login to the user table in order to enter any data.

user_name is used in project logs and the blog. Comments are added to project logs and to the blog.

[ikonia]

what datbase are you planning to use for this ?

[Spunkey]

Personally I'd put User_Name in the user table and get it from there when i need to, simply to avoid data duplication, and also to aid maintenance should someone want to change username.

I assume you're also going to have foreign keys linking the user table & Project/Blog/Content tables as well, just that they arent listed.

[Kezzer]

Personally I'd put User_Name in the user table and get it from there when i need to, simply to avoid data duplication, and also to aid maintenance should someone want to change username.

I assume you're also going to have foreign keys linking the user table & Project/Blog/Content tables as well, just that they arent listed.

I am having user_name in the user table and getting it from there. I'm getting the entry name from the table user hence the "user_name" There is no duplication.

Yup, foreign keys linking to the blog and project. They won't be needed for content.

I'll be using mySQL ikonia

[Kezzer]

Ok i've changed the image so now you can see where the foreign keys are and i realised i don't need a link for the content at all as the content will be the rest of the website (like the about page and so forth).

EDIT: Give me some hints!

[Kezzer]

Ok, updated the image so it should now include everything needed (i hope)

Anything that's wrong with it? I've got more design areas to do yet but i want to know if that's all i need for the database. Then i've got to learn how to do joins and what exactly to join

[atomicjeep]

http://www.opensourcecms.com/

I have been testing this one out (CSS/XHTML out of the box).
http://www.etomite.org/

If u dont build one yourself that is..

[Tarffie]

Passwords/security for your users?

Wouldn't it be easier to have one table called where all the content goes then categories inside that so you have one form and you select a category (Blog, Articles etc) for each entry and then have the contents of each category appear on seperate pages?

[Iain]

You haven't got a key from comments to Articles, Blogs, etc. How are you going to know which it's associated to ?

Also to avoid any issues I'd create one table called items and have id, title, date, content, username, item_type_id in it then another called item_types with id, item_type so that your articles, blogs and project logs are in one table and you could change a blog to an article easily. Also your comments would then not require some field that defines what table they are linked to

No point in having 3 tables with exactly the same fields doing exactly the same thing

[Iain]

Oh and content needs a key to the items table or to your exsiting tables such as blogs if you decide to keep them (which would be a bad idea )