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rck |
“Native or integrated forums?” |
#1 |
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Admin[1999] from Korneuburg |
2005-12-15 17:39 |
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Actually, this could even be about all kind of homepage applications. There are rather controversial oppinions here, I personally prefer native stuff. One framework, many native applications, like eg in the various Nuke derivates.
pro native
- Look and feel (ideally) the same (eg input boxes, etc.)
- Customize theme only once
- Common rights management
- (ideally) easier security updates / patching
- One centralised support
- Improvements of core also improve application
- current version all the time -- integration takes time
pro integrated
- dedicated application team
- higher specialisation
- more domain-knowledge for specific application(?)
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200 channels and... nothing but cats.
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thimscool |
“Re: Native or integrated forums?” |
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Moderator[49] |
2005-12-18 18:02 |
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Integrated applications are here now with full features, and this is often the best way to go when the solution that you dream of has not been invented yet. Customer wants solution now, so cobble one together.
Frameworks are ultimately the way to go, and big business already knows this fact (.NET). In the open source market, it is more like herding cats. You cannot dictate to the phpbb crew that they should develop as if they're making a native app for phpws or mambo. Nobody pledges alegiance to nobody!
This is why phpWebSite is so interesting to me. They are focused on building a solid and powerful development framework, and tying it into a fairly friendly CMS, because ultimately any web-app will need to have certain common features. Due to the enormity of this task, the dev team has not focused on honing the CMS-like tools, as you point out in other posts.
There is also a natural insularity that people building a framework have towards expanding the dev team (and they are also accademic types with other responsibilities). By way of comparison, the Joomla team actively embraced new developers for documentation, graphic and interface design, and even marketing. This adds more glitz and polish to Joomla than you will see in phpWebSite. It certainly makes it easier to sell.
But my hope for Fallout is that once they make their big-picture dreams a reality, the community will help them iron the new framwork out into a a more competative CMS. It is already the case that the core functionality of phpWebSite allows for much more complex structures than Mambo or any other open source CMS except maybe Drupal or Typo3.
The categorization module, for example, allows for an arbitrary number of tree branches, and items can belong to multiple categories. True that it is bad form to expose the site viewer to this level of complexity (like a 5-deep tree menu), but the ability makes it much easier to keep things organized in the database. I have heard people complain that this is only useful for showing 'Related Items' in the side bar. Not so. In fact, fatcat is the best way to display lists of items that are related to specific categories in the heirarchy, without the need for the user to write any fancy queries. And by user, I mean the author/editor, who can then organize their articles into appropriate grouping and display them to the viewer with an easily crafted hyperlink. Best of all, this works for articles, links, photos, etc. since it is just a core feature of the framework. That is the bomb. Compare Joomla's concept of a content category to this description of phpWebSite's functionality.
The only thing that the current category module does not do, which I believe Drupal has achieved, is to make categories (and all of their subcategories) the subcategory of multiple categories. This can lead to circular logic, which requires error checking. But it does allow another degree of flexibility:
"Baseball Caps" is a subcategory of "Apparel", and a call to display this category will show all basball caps. Suppose I want to highlight all baseball caps in a special section of the website for Christmas. I would like to make a "Christmas Specials" category, and add "Baseball Caps" as a subcategory (while keeping it's current status as a subcategroy of "Apparel"). In phpWebSite, no dice. You can manually go to all of the baseball hat items and make them belong, additionally, to the "Christmas Specials" category, but there are a lot of baseball teams! You could write a quick sql script and make it so. But most people can't, and there is a way to overcome this problem by improving fatcat. Still, I'll say it again in spite of this limitation, compared to other OS CMS's, phpWebSite's categorization scheme is the bomb.
Sorry for this detour into rantland. But this is actually just exploring why I feel that native apps in a framework can ultimately be much more powerful by virtue of the fact that they can more easily work with other applications in a consistent, and *elaborate* way. But while I believe this to be true, I am enough of a realist to see that Integrated Applications in a polished CMS are what will appeal to most customers.
That's what I think. What do you think?
-Luke
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