From the previous posts it’s easy to notice that I’ve been searching for an efficient way to code large web projects. While I am still open to frameworks and such I had something happen that kind of “brought me back to my roots.” I have the job of making a website for a not-for-profit organization in my area. I decided that they should have something easy to update, so that means a data driven site with a back-end. I don’t want to use premade systems because they have too many things I don’t want included. I therefore decided to go with what I’ve worked with in the past which is straight PHP.

More specifically PHP5+ and the SQLite database engine. PHP5 perfects a good deal of useful features over the older versions such as the class/object model. It also adds support built-in for the file based SQLite engine. For what I am creating, SQLite takes out a lot of the unnecessary complexity of using MySQL.

I’ve got the database and general site design “done”. I also have a nice chunk of the back-end working. I integrated an open source browser based wysiwyg html editor, so updating the site will be a breeze. I also plan on adding functionality for multi-page events/articles and image galleries.

I’m pretty happy with the results so far. It might be taking me longer by designing and coding a basic content management system myself, but I get the exact result I want without the added fluff of premade stuff.

I might be going into more detail later, so look forward to that!

I guess you could call this part three of the “ajax, json, html, css, easy to update non-server-scripted website series!” This time I will get into my design plans for the client application. It has not been created yet, so there will be some guess work here. Writing this will also help me figure out what exactly I am trying to accomplish here.

Now that the website is:
A simple xhtml page that uses javascript to fetch json text files. That means all of the content is now separate from the main structure of the site.

Next up is deciding on how to make the client application. I have decided to use Visual C# or VB.net 2005 Express Edition. It’s completely free, yeah I was surprised when I found that out… Anyways, A few weeks ago I created an application (which I will post about here in the future) with that development environment and enjoyed using it a lot.

The program may have features like:
- add/update/delete the main page links
- add/update/delete content pages
- modify existing content pages
- upload changes by way of FTP
- Possibly keeps track of what needs to be added/deleted and performs the necessary FTP commands when updating the server. For example, deleting a jpg image when none of the pages use it.
- have a easy to use interface

Underlying functionality:
be able to parse json files
be able to write json files
be able to add/update/delete files from a server

The great thing about newer programming languages like C# and VB.net is that there is probably a lot of that functionality already built into the language or easily accessible.

References:
JSON Website
JSON and Visual Studio 2005
Visual C# 2005 Express Edition