LC Server style survey: co-mingle code w/HTML?

[Sannyasin Brahmanathaswami]

Replying to your original post/surveyr. Not exactly sure what you are looking for… and this is just story telling that may not be directly relevant but perhaps helpful to lurkers

so here goes

at Himalayan academy.com 

We use RevIgniter for everything on our site except the blog… 

public_html/blog # contains wordpress, as we did not see a reason to reinvent that wheel. Matching the theme on WordPress to the theme in Revigniter is as "easy as pie" and I can even mix in some LC results into the WP Blog. Simon in South Africa helps us there.. a WP wizard and also familiar with LC

We use XOOPS for the Hinduism today web site.  That was the first CMS we used even before RevIgniter. Certainly a mix of PHP and html. It was a good decision then (around 2000 or so?) XOOPs has been around a long time. And it has a very high value in terms of ease of use, strong community and we have, for support, one of the top XOOPS community leaders actually working for us on the site, moving up now to  php 7.2 and the latest XOOPS version on cloned instance… should go live very soon. We have desktop client built in LC that pushes content to XOOPS.  the magazine is a "no brainer" many issues, organized By year, quarter, month, articles, archives… a few ancillary info pages… no social other than article comments by registered users, so the customization requirements are very low. The new mobile version will be much much bigger in terms of users and that driven by HTML 5 from BlueToad.

For our "saivasiddhanta.org" (in house for registered members/families) site we use what used to be OC Portal.. now Composer, which I switched to , after a 1.5 year long debacle here with Drupal that finally killed the site we were trying to build/run. I switched to OC Portal because, a) the inhouse man running the site was gaining enough html skills… and b)  OC portal already came with everything he wanted… and c) the UK team behind it was stellar and avoided the "3rd party module hell" that we landed in and drown the project in before with Drupal.

FWIW Drupal is not free!  horror story, no in-house expertise, smart but "secretary" level user, had to hire drupal support, 3rd party module dependencies, developers disappear, core engine transitions to new versions, modules incompatible. Drupal support company bids astronomical $'s to get a module working the latest version of Drupal…before you know it your annual maintenance $ fee start climbing into numbers we can't possibly sustain. we finally had to exit Drupal.

I highly recommend Composer if you do want a CMS that uses PHP, where you need a complete suite to support a social environment. And Chris's support model is the most reasonably priced tier of any software company we ever dealt with. And because all the code is under one roof, he can pretty much get anything you need done.

Customizations (as has been noted) are where you hit the wall. With OC Portal/Composer, it already has such robust tools for social that it would be insane to rebuild all those from ground zero. But theming it is challenging… but more about design expertise really, than the CMS tool box itself. Still as noted by someone else here.. you hit walls on customization…

himalayanacademy.com, the level of customization we wanted, and the fact that we don't do social at all there… we went with LC/RevIgniter, there are no walls there maybe little mountains to climb where it might be easier with new tools… but there is nothing you cannot do. But still I'm not seeing "time to completion" improved by new tools sets over what we have and can do for implementation of any vision, using LC/MySql

Presumably RevIgniter qualifies for your "mx and match" html + LC

    How many of you using LC Server rely on its PHP-like model that 
    encourages mixing HTML with LC code?
    
    Or maybe the better question might be:
    
    How many of you have server systems that already separate HTML from 
    server code like most non-PHP solutions do, or could affordably 
    transition to that model if it could simplify your development workflow 
    significantly?