Often developers have to think about several aspects of the architecture of a system for the Web, not necessarily restricted to requirements of the software. With this in mind the book "PHP 5 CMS - Framework Development" is very rewarding reading.

Alexandre talks about the author of the book, the wide range of topics discussed in it (some not just applying to CMSes) and a breakdown of the contents of each chapter.

It is great work from the book author and the publisher, as we now have another great title, not only about PHP, but also about designing an architecture for software not just for only for creating content management systems.

Many websites will want to control who has access to what. Once embarked on this route, it turns out there are many situations where access control is appropriate, and they can easily become very complex. So in this chapter we look at the most highly regarded model role-based access control and find ways to implement it. The aim is to achieve a flexible and efficient implementation that can be exploited by increasingly sophisticated software. To show what is going on, the example of a file repository extension is used.

They talk about some of the general considerations about access control (limiting the number of rules, common difficulties) and plenty of code/database schema to get you started.

It's hard to choose which one to use without trying them out. As usually, there are more options - home grown custom programming or even building your own CMS (which I was once stupid enough to do). Programming from scratch is always fun and beneficial for your skills, however, if you need things up and running in no time or you don't do (or don't want to do) any programming, using a CMS is the way to go.

His vote is for Drupal but he's included a long list of specs comparing the features of both so you can decide for yourself on which is the better fit.

The CMS I am using is a small engine that puts together (potentially multi-lingual) page content, templates, and a site structure, and creates semi-static pages. It does not have a sleek GUI frontend, because by nature I am not afraid of a text editor, and most of the time get quicker results by just writing HTML than fighting with one of these what-you-see-is-what-you-might-get HTML editors.

He talks about the configuration files containing the app's settings (inspired by the YAML Symfony uses) and his work towards the "best matching pattern" algorithm. This is where the TDD came in - he cheated a little with some base classes (tests first!) and then came up with the tests for checking template names and more complex template interactions.

The post includes drops of code here and there as well - examples of the unit tests and of the configuration files.

From managing databases to shopping, writing blogs to sending emails. Ten years of passion, great software architectures, team work and revolutionary ideas. Here are the most influential open-source PHP applications to date.

Among those on the list are things like SquirrelMail (1999), phpBB (2000), Drupal (2001) and WordPress (2003). More lately things like frameworks and content management systems have been popular and are being developed with more structure and better standards than some of their predecessors.

As a GHOP Task , Cornil did a performance analysis of Drupal and found its two largest performance drains were the bootstrap process and the theming layer. Quite simply, Drupal spends too much time including code. [...] Fortunately, Drupal 7's self-learning code registry system has just landed, which should obliterate most of the wasted bootstrap cost.

Larry describes the "heart of it all", the token_get_all call, that parses through an entire PHP file, splitting out things like classes included and functions called. This is passed through a function_exists call to the current script and, if it's already there, the file isn't included repetitively.

Unlike most of the reviews you get, I was specifically looking at code quality [of the CMSs]. not fuzzy does it look nice!

He looks at a whole list of them including: Tanslucis, Siteman, Pivot, jaf-cms, Guppy, Doop and CutePHP. Unfortunately, most of the news is bad - between badly structured code and mixes of HTML and PHP, there was almost nothing good in any of them.

One of the most popular CMSs is Drupal, partly because it offers all of the aforesaid features, and partly because developers familiar with PHP (the language used by Drupal) can modify the functioning and appearance of almost every aspect of Drupal.

In this tutorial, we will discuss how to install and configure a brand-new Drupal Web site from scratch. We will also touch upon the basics of adding content to a Drupal installation.

They include useful screenshots along the way as well, helping to guide you through the process a bit better than with just words. There's tons of configuration options that you could mess with in a Drupal installation, but they do well to give you the essential ones that you'll need to get it up and running smoothly.

The Drupal development team surprised everyone when they released version 6.0 last week, ahead of schedule.

Over sixteen-hundred issues were corrected and major changes (like usability improvements, security and an expanded development framework) were introduced. They've even created a screencast to help you set up your own CMS site even faster than before.

Find out more on the Drupal homepage.

This piece covers creating a proper folder structure so that we can have a skin system. I've also created a folder for the admin section which is fully contained with it's own controllers folder and so on. Another unrelated change that has happened since the last part is sub menu logic which we will also take a look at.

They make updates to the bootstrap file to introduce another controller directory and, inside of that, create the Administrator controller and integrate it with a Smarty template to show different menu items if an admin user is logged in.