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Hi guys,

It gives me great pleasure to announce that I will be collaborating with fellow Daniwebber Veedeo in creating a fully baked, no nonsense CMS in Codeigniter. I will be overseeing the overall look and feel, PHP and jquery. I will need to discuss how the CMS is licensed with Veedeo.

Veedeo with his great knowledge of MVC will be overseeing the PHP and offering any tips to enhance the core system files.

My inspiration has been taken from pyrocms, after almost a year of development I have put together a CMS that offers a drag and drop menu builder, forums, full user login system (with email authentication), blog and all of which is responsive.

I just need to start pushing this to github, but there is still a lot of work to do.

Anyway here is a teaser screenshot for the login.
Ignited CMS

6f93d9686d83e0bfcb2630aeb29aa58e

JorgeM commented: Looks great! Best of luck on your project. +12
cereal commented: great! +13
veedeoo commented: excited and awed +9
diafol commented: phew! A lot of work. Big hand. +15
<M/> commented: Awesome! +10

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All 56 Replies

Awesome!!!!!

Hey, that's pretty cooool. :).

Any news on this guys? Looks really good!

To tell the truth, I'm very jelous of this partnership.

Member Avatar for iamthwee

@diafol no that wasn't me :)

Sorry about the big delay, but I'm intent on working on this over christmas. As I've got a few weeks of free time.

Ready to test the bare bones now...

https://github.com/ignitedcms/ignitedcms

On the to do list.

1) Build a blog page
2) Integrate a forum page
3) Integrate simple page builder with better upload facility
4) Build a bare bones site preview page
5) Build an asset management page, add text fields, dropdown fields and upload fields.

To be continued...

CodeIgniter, yayyyyy!!!!

Looks really good I have to say, and I'll follow the development closely.

Have you thought yet about the business element yet? I really don't wan't to knock your project because it's awesome - but you are entering a very tough area. Wordpress for instance, it loaded with features and has a very powerful platform for developers to customise however they want. Have you thought ways you're gonna kick their butts yet?

And btw, I have often found wordpress lacks user management controls - so if you could look at permissions for users and involving a logged-in community (even with pages/content permissions) you're on to something. Almost like phpBB/IPB usergroups, with certain pages/posts/forums allocated to certain users/groups.

If you're planning on releasing all those features, it may heavier/more complex than existing apps, so what about a customiseable download, like a simplified version of the Bootstrap customiser?

Are you thinking of privately licencing it or using one of the open source licences?

I have to say I'm not as much use as others with the PHP, but I can help with the marketing/business/design/CSSy jQuery stuff if you ever need :)

Good luck guys, I'm sure this will work very very well if you get it right!

Member Avatar for iamthwee

Thanks mattster,

I've not thought about how big this is going to be yet. At the moment it is going to be a simple clone of pyrocms, but will be much much more prettier.

As you can see I have spent a lot of care and attention in making this a one click install, a lot of care has been taken into branding and keeping the UX as uncluttered as possible.

It is my opinion the menu builder, which is a copycat of the wordpress menu is a beautiful piece of code engineering :)

I do like the idea of of making this more customizable for user permissions, wordpress is somewhat lacking but then I bet there is a plugin for it somewhere.

I'm not too sure about the bootstrap customizer. I'm all for a once click install, and this is to appeal to the masses as well as business individuals.

For the licensing, I've discussed with veedeeo and at the moment it is GPL, but that is not to say I might pull it down and change it into the future, if I think it has real commercial appeal. At the moment, I don't so it is free to everyone.

I am always looking for other collaborators, so if you're interested you're more than welcome to collaborate. However, I will oversee the overall look and feel and transistions of all the jquery.

PM me if you want.

BTW, just completed the blog!

That background for the login looks pretty awesome

I've taken a quick look at the github .zip file, and I thought I'd have a play.

I never got the one-click install, instead all I got was a database error (wanting me to setup the DB config files). Even if I pointed it to a database, it runs streight to "installer/login" and spits out an error when it can't find the users table. So that's as far as I got with it really...

Hopefully you're aware of this?

Unfortunately I have a few professional projects at the moment, so that is a bit of a bummer...
With any luck I'll be able to help out later on :)

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Got error too...

codeig.PNG

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Oh this is bad, it should be fool proof.

Mattster you can't manually add the db config files as you will miss the installer.

Was the directory fully writeable before install?

Diafol I'm not sure what's going on there, but you should have renamed the zip file to just ignitedcms.

It won't work with ignitedcms-master. Or at least shouldn't.

Can you guys try again?

____

OK I've just updated the db config file, can you remove your old files and old database redownload and try again! I had my server settings in there which is why it probably wasn't working!!!

Happy to see Men at work for better Dani!!

Member Avatar for diafol

with regard to igniter-master / igniter. I downloaded zip copied zip contents to my local domain. Why do I need to rename anything? Isn't that an extra step? I'd suggest that it should work regardless of what you name the top level directory.

I downloaded it and renamed the directory, and ran the program. I got exactly the same error as @diafol, so after I thought if it try to set the db up manually, I might at least get to look at everything else.

I agree though, it makes things unnecessarily complicated. What if I wanted to rename it to something of my choice? or extract it all into a root directry? There's no way you could limit what the root folder should be called.

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Hi guys,

Happy New year, can you retest with the new files and let me know if it works. There shouldn't be any manual editing of the files, I just left my db details in the config file by accident.

I will look into a way to sorting out the naming of the root folder but for the time being you HAVE to remove the '-master' bit. This is what github automatically appends to any project.

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Any joy, I would be interested in some feedback?

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Tried the new files with rename. Got this weird looking screen:

ig2.PNG

I would say a few issues with this:

Black strip: jumbled - why profile/options? Looks like something missing too with uneven bottom border

Missing image and Installation heading could be bolder or a <h...> tag.

Server name textbox could be set to localhost as default value
root name little confusing - why "root"? perhaps mysql username better with root as default value
database name has star by label. Is that significant? Suggests further info available somewhere?
The alignment of labels:textbox a little inconsistent - dbname is below label all others adjacent

Perhaps idea to allow tables to go to named db as opposed to creating a new one? Don't know what would happen if you entered name of existing db. Useful for people with hosting accounts that only allow the one db. Possibly more useful for users to be able to prefix tables with something specific e.g. "icms_", so that if they have to create your tables in their one database, they don't confuse or overwrite exisiting ones.

Ok, when I pressed save...

ig3.PNG

No new db was created

Installer works fine, really nice, easy and simple :)

Two things about the install:

  • Apparently you cant have numbers in the database name? You might want to look at this as someone might want to use a number at the end.
  • There's also no provision for a prefix
  • The main account is automatically named 'admin', are you planning on keeping it this way?

I like the look of the rest of the site, but a few pointers:

  • The options/profile links in the header have a top-margin, making them look off centered, is this intentional?
  • The timezone is wrong - it's about 4:45 PM and ICMS think's it's 5:45.
  • You have a fadeOut on some alerts (I'm seeing the 'create page'), which fade the element so it isn't visible, but doesn't actually delete the alert (so its still clickable) or move the content up.
  • A 100x100 icon is very large for each page/post? Would look pretty cluttered on a site with lots of pages.
  • Should "Blog Name" be the heading for a post title field?
  • Do I have to rename the site if I wan't to upload a logo? You're supposedly storing them in the DB as two seperate columns "site" and "blog"??? Guessing you've not got to this bit yet ;)

I really like the look of your single blog post! I'll take the time to look at it more later, maybe I will end up giving you a hand on it ;P

Good luck, looks great so far!! :D

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@Diafol, I've not tested this on windows so I don't know why it is displaying jumbled like that, I can only imagine it is not finding the stylesheets.

Does xxamp have a default apache port?

If you go to the folder config > config.php

$config['base_url'] = 'http://localhost:8888/ignitedcms/';

And edit the line and replace 8888 with the default port number.

Please delete your old files and replace with a fresh install, that is the only consistent way for me to debug your errors. Don't forget to rename the folder ignitedcms and NOT ignitedcms-master!

Mattster thank you for your feedback, I guess the install went fine :)

I will definitely take into account your feedback and make those amends, at the moment I'm working on the image asset library then will push to github.

Diafol let me know how you get on, I'm interested to know how this works on a windows setup.

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Mattster did you get a change to test the menu builder, I would be interested in your feedback for the UX,

P.S The timezone is set to UK time, I guess I could add a time zone option in the install.

Yeah I did, the drag and drop thing is excellent, works really well.

Doesn't seem to automatically add new pages, though. I have to remove and add all pagesand then build the menu again.

Maybe you could made provision for custom links as well as pages?

I like it :D

BTW: I am using XAMPP on Win 7, and I dont get any of those problems with the install.

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BTW: I am using XAMPP on Win 7, and I dont get any of those problems with the install.

Maybe Diafol just forgot to delete all the old files and do a fresh install from github... Can't say until he replies.

Thanks all feedback is being duely noted and added to the roadmap :)

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OK guys I've added asset management, this is where you upload your pictures and later add them to your pages!

Roadmap, immediate fixes.

  • Allow database name to be prefixed with igcms underscore
  • Add a select timezone during installation
  • Site settings page, site name already filled in during install
  • Fix fade out alerts so they are not clickable
  • Reduce icon for pages (and add pagination ->later)
  • Change blog name to post title

I'm going to leave the menu as is, but there will be a feature to add custom links.

As always remember to delete your previous installs and database before a fresh install.

Ta

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Quick design on how I expect the screen for setting up the time zones... What do you think?

local.jpg

Member Avatar for diafol

Maybe Diafol just forgot to delete all the old files and do a fresh install from github... Can't say until he replies.

Cheeky sod. I deleted, fresh install, deleted cache and renamed to ignitedcms.

This is my local url, not that it should matter:

http://dragonflower.local/ignitedcms/index.php

I had to change the $config['base_url'] setting in config/config.php as you said to http://dragonflower.local/ignitedcms/

So, it seems that it fails if you do not manually configure this setting. That's ok as long as the user is aware of it. As codeigniter installs over 300-odd files onto my system at a time, finding the issue is not any fun at all. This is an issue with all frameworks. I really, really dislike CI - sorry. The fact that it installs into the public folder annoys the hell out of me. perhaps you can change this now with newer versions, but that was one of the reasons I swapped to Laravel.

Anyway. DBs set up. Tried to add new page. Added page. Tried to edit. Nothing to do - blank page.

Check DB - only handful of tables there. Is this right?
Also you can't set a site name without uploading a logo - ends in fail. Perhaps a default logo should be included or you don't insist on logo.

Also seems like adding a blog post requires an image:

"Failed Make sure the file type is OK" was an error I got.

Sorry seems like a bit of negativity, but just some feedback about issues I ran into.

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This is my local url, not that it should matter:

http://dragonflower.local/ignitedcms/index.php

Interesting, actually I was thinking about this the other day. If you don't know before hand the url on which the site is going to sit how can you possibly point codeigniter to it? Which is why I set it up as localhost as default.

The only way to get around this I think I need to use a stand alone php installer written in just vanilla php.

As codeigniter installs over 300-odd files onto my system at a time, finding the issue is not any fun at all. This is an issue with all frameworks

Yep but it also speeds up dev, and when this is fully polished there won't be any need searching the files.

Anyway. DBs set up. Tried to add new page. Added page. Tried to edit. Nothing to do - blank page.

Check DB - only handful of tables there. Is this right?Also you can't set a site name without uploading a logo - ends in fail. Perhaps a default logo should be included or you don't insist on logo.

Also seems like adding a blog post requires an image:

"Failed Make sure the file type is OK" was an error I got.

Yep these are all known issues I'm in the process of writing controllers for.

Thanks for the feedback, like I said I wouldn't have known others we're experiencing these things unless someone trials it.

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btw the db created has latin1 / latin1_swedish_ci as charset/collation. Whether this is the default from mysql or set in your code I don't know, but it may be advantageous to set to utf8mb4/utf8mb4_unicode_ci if available. Just a thought.

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Thanks Diafol I'll look into the database creation and why it is latin.

One last day to work on this before back to the grindstone, I'm tossing up forum integration and page builder. I think a page builder is more important so I'll finish that tonight.

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