PhpMyAdmin as a CMS



  • So a while back I posted on here about a project that was e-mailed to me about a mobile news app. I took up the project because the airfare to go watch my brother graduate from infantry school kinda destroyed my finances (the rental car and hotel didn't help either). So as we're getting development going, I suggest that we should get a designer for the front-end as I am just a programmer and not much of a designer. I've seen webapps designed by programmers, and it isn't pretty. Anyhow, I recommend that we go to the student organization that I also mention occasionally (the guys with the idea didn't care too much for what the organization wanted to do and so parted ways) for designers as they do good work on that end. I recommend that we try to get Bill and not Val (not real names).

    See, I wanted Bill over Val because 1) Val was notoriously flaky (I still wondered how he even has a job considering how much he doesn't work) and 2) Val LOVES PHP, I don't. If PHP was a person, I'm pretty sure Val would marry it. And have kids with it. I wanted Bill mainly because of the former. I wanted to write a CMS in Java because 1) I wanted to learn the Spring framework, 2) I HATE PHP, and 3) All the good CMS solutions are written in PHP. One day we decide to have a videoconference and naturally, Val was difficult to get a hold of. I don't know if it was technical issues, his known flakiness, or a combination of both (this is the one that I'm most sure on). We eventually get a hold of Val, and Val immediately goes on his "I know more than you" path, which pisses me off real quick, because he isn't from Nebraska and acts like he knows more about .com startups than a bunch of VCs. He starts wondering why is the whole project is needed (it's money bro, just shut up and do the work) and trying to speed up a product release when we have only one newspaper on board.

    Val had a solution though to get a product out real quick though. His solution? Newspapers send us stories and we use phpMyAdmin to put those stories into a table with a TEXT column. The problem? He didn't even bother to read the requirements let alone realize he's only supposed to be a front-end designer. The guys in charge of the project wanted images in the stories and a commenting system with Twitter integration, stuff that just can't be done with a few PHP pages and phpMyAdmin. At this point I was hoping that FPoIP or RKoIP (Roundhouse Kick over IP) was a reality so I could knock some sense into Val. Fortunately the guy in charge of the project liked my better efficiency post because 1) we have the time to do it right and 2) dealing with the database directly when a new story comes in is a lot of work for one or two guys.

    A week later we had a lunch meeting down at Qdoba. Val was STILL insistent on his approach instead of focusing our energy on one way and doing it right. We ended up going both ways to save time (read: I wanted him to shut the hell up and start doing something to see how dumb his way is): his "I'm a dumbass genius" route and my "Let's do it right Too slow" approach. All I know is someday dealing with all this stupidity will kill me.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @HuskerFan90 said:

    I wanted to write a CMS
    TRWTF has been identified.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

     Fun fact!  phpMyAdmin is actually a eugenics experiment. It's intentionally designed to be so fucktardedly useless that only an abjact moron would ever use it. That's why the EULA, upon accepting it, gives the phpMyAdmin people permission to perform 72nd term abortions on the acceptor.



  • There is no "I" in "team" but there is "meat".



  • @Lorne Kates said:

     Fun fact!  phpMyAdmin is actually a eugenics experiment. It's intentionally designed to be so fucktardedly useless that only an abjact moron would ever use it. That's why the EULA, upon accepting it, gives the phpMyAdmin people permission to perform 72nd term abortions on the acceptor.

    Tell me about it. It's why I haven't used it since I was in high school when I didn't know better. Nowadays I create a SQL script with my table definitions or updates and run it via NetBeans on my dev box or via the command line on my actual server.

    Also, the same guy pisses me off every time he complains about some dumb simple way to build RESTful Web services that auto update magically doesn't exist for (insert platform here except iOS). Apparently he doesn't know what ACTUAL coding is.



  • @dkf said:

    @HuskerFan90 said:
    I wanted to write a CMS
    TRWTF has been identified.

    I could've customized Joomla or Drupal, but I find that the less I have to interact with PHP the happier I am. So far I'm on a several month roll of being pretty damn happy about not dealing with PHP.



  • @El_Heffe said:

    There is no "I" in "team" but there is "meat".


    There is, however, an i in TEAM.



  • @El_Heffe said:

    There is no "I" in "team" but there is "meat".

    If you try really hard, you can also find "shots," which is what I did every Friday night while I worked for one of my previous employers. I even seen some managers do the exact same thing. This was and still is a fairly regular occurrence. There are stories at that place about their corporate offices sustaining damage after their annual Christmas party.

    Oh, the stories I could tell about that place in my short time there.



  • @HuskerFan90 said:

    If you try really hard, you can also find "shots,"

    In America, that would be revised to "family-friendly rifle fun night with alcohol" by the NRA



  • @Ben L. said:

    @HuskerFan90 said:
    If you try really hard, you can also find "shots,"

    In America, that would be revised to "family-friendly rifle fun night with alcohol" by the NRA

    Evangelicals would revise that to "adult stress relief time."



  • @HuskerFan90 said:

    @dkf said:
    @HuskerFan90 said:
    I wanted to write a CMS
    TRWTF has been identified.

    I could've customized Joomla or Drupal, but I find that the less I have to interact with PHP the happier I am. So far I'm on a several month roll of being pretty damn happy about not dealing with PHP.

    I think you more mean "the less you have to deal with Joomla/Drupal/WordPress". It's unfortunate that what most people use written in PHP is very poor PHP. (Procedural and cobbled together). PHP that's actually written (from scratch) with OOP principals at the core can be excellent.

    It's quite a shame that things like Drupal/WordPress/Joomla exist and are so prominent. People look at their code and deem that representative of all PHP code, which couldn't be further from the truth.



  • @gu3st said:

    @HuskerFan90 said:
    @dkf said:
    @HuskerFan90 said:
    I wanted to write a CMS
    TRWTF has been identified.

    I could've customized Joomla or Drupal, but I find that the less I have to interact with PHP the happier I am. So far I'm on a several month roll of being pretty damn happy about not dealing with PHP.

    I think you more mean "the less you have to deal with Joomla/Drupal/WordPress". It's unfortunate that what most people use written in PHP is very poor PHP. (Procedural and cobbled together). PHP that's actually written (from scratch) with OOP principals at the core can be excellent.

    It's quite a shame that things like Drupal/WordPress/Joomla exist and are so prominent. People look at their code and deem that representative of all PHP code, which couldn't be further from the truth.

    The end user doesn't care what the code looks like. If they can plop some files in a folder and suddenly they have a website that looks nice, why should they care if it's procedural or OOP?



  • @Ben L. said:

    @gu3st said:
    @HuskerFan90 said:
    @dkf said:
    @HuskerFan90 said:
    I wanted to write a CMS
    TRWTF has been identified.

    I could've customized Joomla or Drupal, but I find that the less I have to interact with PHP the happier I am. So far I'm on a several month roll of being pretty damn happy about not dealing with PHP.

    I think you more mean "the less you have to deal with Joomla/Drupal/WordPress". It's unfortunate that what most people use written in PHP is very poor PHP. (Procedural and cobbled together). PHP that's actually written (from scratch) with OOP principals at the core can be excellent.

    It's quite a shame that things like Drupal/WordPress/Joomla exist and are so prominent. People look at their code and deem that representative of all PHP code, which couldn't be further from the truth.

    The end user doesn't care what the code looks like. If they can plop some files in a folder and suddenly they have a website that looks nice, why should they care if it's procedural or OOP?

    Except I'm not talking about end user. I'm talking about developers. Developers give PHP shit for crappy things that are written like Joomla/Drupal/Wordpress which are written terribly. PHP can be a great language if written well from the start. The biggest thing is that only recent-ish PHP versions have given the tools to write things properly.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @El_Heffe said:

    There is no "I" in "team" but there is "meat".

    Have you seriously not seen this graphic yet?:





  • @El_Heffe said:

    There is no "I" in "team".

     

    There is no "u" either. Get out.

     

     



  • @HuskerFan90 said:

    ... he complains about some dumb simple way to build RESTful Web services that auto update magically doesn't exist...

    Isn't this what SOAP is for? Isn't that what SOAP does that RESTful stuff doesn't?


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @PJH said:

    @El_Heffe said:

    There is no "I" in "team" but there is "meat".

    Have you seriously not seen this graphic yet?:

     

    Nope. I haven't:


     

     



  •  @dkf said:

    @HuskerFan90 said:
    I wanted to write a CMS
    TRWTF has been identified.

     

    This. If you want to avoid PHP, just choose a CMS base on Java or whatever language your prefer.  But rolling your own is obviously stupid and a waste of time.



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    @PJH said:

    @El_Heffe said:

    There is no "I" in "team" but there is "meat".

    Have you seriously not seen this graphic yet?:



     

    Nope. I haven't:


     

     




    <3



  • @beginner_ said:

     @dkf said:

    @HuskerFan90 said:
    I wanted to write a CMS
    TRWTF has been identified.

     

    This. If you want to avoid PHP, just choose a CMS base on Java or whatever language your prefer.  But rolling your own is obviously stupid and a waste of time.

    The last time I had checked Wikipedia for Java CMSes there weren't many to choose from. It looks like people have started making some more, and I genuinely did not know this. Still not as bad as using phpMyAdmin for content management though and doesn't excuse it.



  • @Shoreline said:

    @HuskerFan90 said:
    ... he complains about some dumb simple way to build RESTful Web services that auto update magically doesn't exist...

    Isn't this what SOAP is for? Isn't that what SOAP does that RESTful stuff doesn't?

    No. He is looking for some framework that does the hard work for him (read: saves an hour for someone who knows what they are doing) when building RESTful Web services.

    Also, you have to have some...issues if you want to use SOAP in a mobile app. Especially a mobile web app. I had to deal with SOAP in a mobile app at one of my previous employers, it was painful. God only knows the pain of interacting with SOAP via Javascript.



  • I admit that I have, on occasion (this morning, for instance), briefly considered re-writing a hideous Access "application" which I have to support, and think to myself, "self, you could do that pretty easily in PHP, and it would work much better and be less buggy and easier to support". Then I'd put the thought off to the back of my mind and tell it not to bother my conscious mind again for a while.

    What I have never, ever, EVER thought is, "self, you could do that in Java". Java sucks. Worse than PHP.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Ben L. said:

    @HuskerFan90 said:
    If you try really hard, you can also find "shots,"

    In America, that would be revised to "family-friendly rifle fun night with alcohol" by the NRA

    Good God, Ben, try not to act like a shill for Short-cup Bloomberg.



  • @gu3st said:

    @HuskerFan90 said:
    @dkf said:
    @HuskerFan90 said:
    I wanted to write a CMS
    TRWTF has been identified.

    I could've customized Joomla or Drupal, but I find that the less I have to interact with PHP the happier I am. So far I'm on a several month roll of being pretty damn happy about not dealing with PHP.

    I think you more mean "the less you have to deal with Joomla/Drupal/WordPress". It's unfortunate that what most people use written in PHP is very poor PHP. (Procedural and cobbled together). PHP that's actually written (from scratch) with OOP principals at the core can be excellent.

    It's quite a shame that things like Drupal/WordPress/Joomla exist and are so prominent. People look at their code and deem that representative of all PHP code, which couldn't be further from the truth.

     

     

    I would agree with you on Wordpress being coded poorly, I mean, who the fuck thinks that the_content($more_link_text, $stripteaser) is a good name for a function. Do you have any idea what this does based on the name? I've taken a look at so called "professional commercial plugins" that are chock-full of inconsistent backend interfaces and bad coding conventions and wonder why exactly someone would pay $60 for some shitty form plugin. This CMS is best used by people whose most in depth experience with code is googling snippets and pasting ad nauseam.

    Drupal on the other hand is generally written pretty well if you remember that it's written as a proceedural CMS. For the most part, it does stay proceedural until you want to extend very few user contributed modules. And at least these user contributed modules have a code review process before they go public. It's got a huge learning curve but once you learn how to use a hook system, extending core code and other modules is pretty straight forward... however the upcoming Drupal 8 seems to me as a mish mash of OOP and proceedural.



  • @captainpants said:

    @gu3st said:

    @HuskerFan90 said:
    @dkf said:
    @HuskerFan90 said:
    I wanted to write a CMS
    TRWTF has been identified.

    I could've customized Joomla or Drupal, but I find that the less I have to interact with PHP the happier I am. So far I'm on a several month roll of being pretty damn happy about not dealing with PHP.

    I think you more mean "the less you have to deal with Joomla/Drupal/WordPress". It's unfortunate that what most people use written in PHP is very poor PHP. (Procedural and cobbled together). PHP that's actually written (from scratch) with OOP principals at the core can be excellent.

    It's quite a shame that things like Drupal/WordPress/Joomla exist and are so prominent. People look at their code and deem that representative of all PHP code, which couldn't be further from the truth.

     

     

    I would agree with you on Wordpress being coded poorly, I mean, who the fuck thinks that the_content($more_link_text, $stripteaser) is a good name for a function. Do you have any idea what this does based on the name? I've taken a look at so called "professional commercial plugins" that are chock-full of inconsistent backend interfaces and bad coding conventions and wonder why exactly someone would pay $60 for some shitty form plugin. This CMS is best used by people whose most in depth experience with code is googling snippets and pasting ad nauseam.

    Drupal on the other hand is generally written pretty well if you remember that it's written as a proceedural CMS. For the most part, it does stay proceedural until you want to extend very few user contributed modules. And at least these user contributed modules have a code review process before they go public. It's got a huge learning curve but once you learn how to use a hook system, extending core code and other modules is pretty straight forward... however the upcoming Drupal 8 seems to me as a mish mash of OOP and proceedural.

    Wordpress is something truly awful. Their actual routing process (for pages) is this 75+ line if/else if clusterfuck. Drupal is less bad, but still terrible. Having worked on a fully procedural CMS for several years, and now working on a fully OOP one, it makes me vomit to see how Drupal and Wordpress are still so behind. I understand it's a ridiculously large process (almost unreasonable) to rewrite either of them to be truly OOP, but they're unfortunately affecting the overall perception of PHP. Drupal at least shows that sign of trying to improve (code wise.. their UI still sucks IMO), but Wordpress seems to be stuck in this stasis of terrible code and plugin vomit to build anything.



  • @gu3st said:

    I would agree with you on Wordpress being coded poorly, I mean, who the fuck thinks that the_content is a good name for a function. Do you have any idea what this does based on the name?

    Obviously it does the content.



  • function the_content() {
    }
    
    function the_discontent() {
        throw new Error();
    }

    ...why the fuck do I have to put <br> tags inside a [code] block?



  • @anotherusername said:

    function the_content() {
    }

    function the_discontent() {
    throw new Error();
    }

    ...why the fuck do I have to put <br> tags inside a [code] block?

    Because [code] is not a real html tag. If you mean <code>, then it's because <code> is an inline element.



  • No, I meant what I posted. [code]. BBcode is supposed to work though. Also, I broke your post. Ha.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    [code][]]code][/code] is usually quicker to type when escaping to get [code][]code][/code] to display.



  • ...[code]also, I now know how to screw with CS forums when people try to reply to me...


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