Livecode Content Management System

Fri Dec 1 14:20:26 EST 2017

Hi

I have played with this a bit, and got pretty far for a proof of concept
for an ecommerce project I was working on. I stopped working on it when I
left the company I was working for.

I did not use rev igniter since I wanted it to function as it's own
framework and I think it just makes the coding simpler in the end. I was
not coding it in the IDE but rather my text editor (sublime), it just works
so nicely for web projects =) and I have not really had any problems with
debugging in the browser.

I got pretty far with it. Creating pages, posts products etc, Had a WYSIWYG
editor (TinyMCE) along with a simple image uploader / manager. Themes
worked and kinda had I have an idea on how to handle some type of plugin
architecture. It was working pretty well for the project I was developing
it for. I have since then started cleaning it up  and making it more of a
generic CMS but time is my biggest problem  :(. The idea was / is to have
an alternative CMS that I could use for when WordPress was not a good fit
for a website.

I have also done a much simpler "CMS" in LC for my blog. It's just 1 lc
file and an sqlite database and does pretty much everything I need. Still
needs a bit of cleaning up, but I am quiet happy with the way it turned out
and how easy it was code.

To answer your question:

1) Apart from time, l did find that there were a few PHP functions that
would have be very useful  to have in LiveCode but I could work around
pretty much all the problems I had.
2) Everything has its place. WordPress is a fantastic CMS and capable of
much more than most people realise but does have it's limits.
3) Unfortunately I don't have much rev igniter experience, but I have never
been fond of using frameworks in web projects.

If everything was working smoothly and quickly, I don't think it is
necessary to remove rev igniter and I would far rather work with a text
editor and debug in the browser than in the IDE.

While WordPress is a very popular CMS (can't deny that) it can become very
user unfriendly very quickly, and not to mention slow. Clients are usually
happy to accept alternative solutions if they will make their lives easier
(even if they are simpler and lack all the functionality of a more popular
CMS. It is amazing how much faster a CMS can be once you strip out all the
unneeded functionality.

Simon

Carpe diem

*Simon Smith*
m. +27 83 306 7862

On Fri, Dec 1, 2017 at 3:56 AM, Alex Tweedly via use-livecode <
use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> I'm looking for (initial) interest, previous experience, comments, etc.
>
> Every few [ = 4 to 8] months for the last few [= 2 to 3] years, I've been
> either building a new website for someone, or making significant
> changes/enhancements to an existing one. Almost every time, unless the
> changes are very small, I've decided that I really *should* convert it to
> use a 'proper' CMS - e.g. Wordpress.
>
> And I've tried - but every time I've foundered on not being able to get
> the site to be what I want, or realizing (believing?) that to do what I
> want requires real development skills within WP - and therefore too much of
> a learning curve and/or too much PHP.  Or, I've decided that to make it a
> bearable experience I need to use multiple add-ons (plugins, themes, etc.)
> and then found that the plugins I spent hours investigating and choosing
> were incompatible. Or were just not well enough documented.
>
> [ I won't tell you how often I've found a (video) tutorial, wasted an
> entire hour or more watching it - then realized that it was for an
> out-of-date version of the plugin, or an old version of Wordpress, and that
> all the helpful screenshots showed me how to modify settings / actions that
> didn't exist, or had no obvious equivalent, in the current versions. ]
>
> Twice, having run into brick walls with Wordpress, I've tried other CMSs
> (Concrete5 and ??Dolphin??) with similar results - poor / out-of-date docs
> have left me stranded - 80% of the way towards doing what I wanted and
> unable to get any further.
>
> So in every case until now, I've given up, made tweaks / extensions to my
> own "home-grown" web site tool(s), and - so far - completed my enhancements
> in less time than I had wasted trying the "real" CMS.
>
> I put that down to:
>  - the power of Livecode
>  - the power of revIgniter  (thank you ! again, Ralf)
>  - my impatience in trying to learn new tools
>
> But now I have a new, bigger opportunity / challenge - I've been asked to
> build a web site (actually two unrelated web sites) which are bigger and
> more complex, and for which I absolutely do not want to become the de facto
> on-going (content) maintainer.
>
> So, I've decided to build LCMS - a Livecode Content Management System.
>
> It will be (very loosely) based on what I think are the useful ideas in
> Wordpress (but without any tendency towards blogs). It will be relatively
> simple.
>
> It won't be:
>  - smooth, slick and all-powerful like WP
>  - able to support (initially, and for some time) real independent
> development of themes, plugins, auto-loading and updating, etc. etc. (yada,
> yada, yada ...) - that might be done in a few [= 2 to 20 years]
>
> It will be :
>  - based on Livecode (and extensible in LC)
>  - (I hope) simple and easy (for a LC developer) to understand, use and
> extend
>  - complete with at least one complete theme (based on Botstrap)
>  - (at some point) open source, on github, etc. under MIT liceense
>  - documented in some old-fashioned way (i.e. written, searchable,
> skimmable tutorials - few or no Youtube videos to waste your time)
>
> OK - enough of the advertising pitch :-)
>
> Here are the requests for input ....
>
> 1.  has anyone tried this before ? and did you succeed ?  or why did you
> stop ? any foreseeable problems to contend with ?
>
> 2. am I just tilting at windmills and I should just go back to studying WP
> and its plugins ?
>
> 3. the current prototype is based on (or rather 'is written over'
> revIgniter).
>
> I have very conflicting opinions of revIgniter
>     + it's wonderful, it has a huge quantity of things it "just does" (in
> a well documented, well tested, etc. way)  so that I don't need to think or
> learn about them, etc. - I love it.
>     - (a) it is intimately tied to LC server, with heavy dependency on
> 'include' so it's impossible to (as I would want to do) test 99% of my code
> in the IDE, with debugging etc. help.
>     - (b) I *really* dislike the "rigLoadView" scheme - it forces (or
> seems to force) far too much co-mingling of code and content within the
> view files, and has no clear way to use "themes"
>
> The current version of LCMS simply ignores the 'View' (and 'Model') part
> of revIgniter, and generates all its output based on  ''pages' and
> 'themes'  (and 'menus') - but it sill benefits from all the other parts of
> revIgniter).
>
> do you think it would be worth the (considerable) effort needed to remove
> the dependency on rvIgniter in the hope of benefiting from the reduced
> complexity, hopefully lower overhead, easier debugging a higher percentage
> within the Ide, etc. ?
>
> Thanks for any suggestions, input, etc.
>
> Alex.
>
>
>
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