dev|sushi

A few years ago I looked into using a Content Management System (CMS) to develop a site for a friend. At the time there were a few choices including Mambo, Joomla, Drupal, and about a hundred more which you can test at Open Source CMS. Mambo was really the only player that had the needed feature set which included forum/gallery/blogs/etc all in one user based interface (thanks to the many extensions). The only issue was that the system was horribly unfriendly to the internet and its standards. Each control/plugin box on the page was wrapped in a table inside another table and finally another table. Doing any template work was nightmare-ish especially if you wanted to use proper XHTML and CSS; and don’t even get me started on accessibility. I didn’t end up doing the project because my recommendation was to write it all myself.

I am a code control freak. If I don’t understand every aspect of how something works I can’t get comfortable using it. I don’t know a lot of programmers so I don’t know how common this is in the community. At work I program in ASP.Net using Visual Studio 2005, however, I only use it as a text editor (for the syntax highlighting and intellisense). I am not comfortable with the web project front-end since there is way too much magic going on in there. I don’t want to click a button and have the software generate a bunch of web pages, change some configuration settings and update the database. “Why?” you ask; because what if something goes wrong? I would have no idea how my own application actually works or where to begin looking for bugs. If you surf in a couple ASP.Net forums you will see a lot of users posing questions that show a definite lack of understand about how things work.

I’m in the market for a PHP framework to use for my future projects. Compiling a list is fairly simple using Google, there are quite a few blogs that mention which are best overall or best for certain applications, for example, this one and this one. With all the talk about Ruby on Rails lately I was curious about it but for the most part I don’t see the point in learning a new programming language just to use the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture and scaffolding. There are quite a few PHP frameworks that use the same concepts (including one that is being directly copied from Rails). My goal is to find the best for my needs.