Webapps Archive

Symphony CMS; the Best CMS?

By
Frank Groeneveld
 – August 11, 2010Posted in: Programming, Webapps

I’ve been looking for a good Content Management System (CMS) the last couple of days after a colleague and I had some discussion about what CMS to use for our clients. Sometimes we have clients with specific needs, which are difficult to fulfill using WordPress. The solution we used to choose was either build some plugins or use our custom developed CMS. However, none of these are a great solution. WordPress can be complicated for novice computer users, has a messy code-base and our own CMS is not really user-friendly either.

My colleague decided to try out ExpressionEngine. He bought the freelancer edition and he’s been trying things out. Up until now, it all seems to work quite well, although the back-end can still be too complicated for our clients. Also, I hate the fact that you should pay 300 dollars to use ExpressionEngine for a commercial company. Thats an added fee some customers would rather spend on different things.

So, I started to search for open-source CMSes myself and made a list of requirements.

  • It should not be page based, it should allow you to model your own content. If you use a CMS that supports types/entities/resources/sections/whatever you can create your own page type, but you can also create more advanced things like portfolio items, projects or products (yes, even a simple web shop is possible then).
  • The back-end should be as simple as possible.
  • It should be written in PHP, object-oriented if possible, and use MySQL for storage.
  • There should be a good, flexible templating engine for the views.
  • It should have a good plugin API.

Well, using this list it was a lot easier to search for the most fitting CMS, as quite a lot CMSes are only page or post based. The list of possible candidates shrunk by more than 75%. Eventually I found a CMS I had never heard of, but which seemed to have all the things we were looking for: Symphony CMS.

I’ve been trying it out in the last few days and I still haven’t found any deal-breakers. Symphony CMS has a great website, friendly community (because it’s still small I think), great features, simple back-end, small code-base and it can be easily extended by writing extensions.

Some things might give problems for specific clients though: multi file upload is non-existant (there’s one extension that doesn’t do what it should) and the WYSIWYG editor extensions, with support for placing images etc., don’t seem to be integrated well enough with Symphony CMS yet. Well, maybe I’ll just fix those two myself and contribute them upstream. That is, if I have some spare time… :)

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Crawljax 1.9 Released

By
Frank Groeneveld
 – April 16, 2010Posted in: Linux, Programming, Security, Webapps

We just released Crawljax 1.9, the project I’m working on for my master thesis. It’s mostly a “bug fix and clean up” release, but some important changes were made as well.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Guest Blog Post Published at CDT

By
Frank Groeneveld
 – February 25, 2010Posted in: Webapps

The launch of pleaserobme.com received a lot more media attention than we had expected. We were on a number of international radio stations, national television etc.

Furthermore, Adam Rosenberg of Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) asked us to write a guest blog post. Of course we were interested in doing so, because it gave us another opportunity to make people aware of the potential problems of sharing your location with the whole world. The post was pusblished today and can be read on the CDT website.

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Location spam, annoying and.. risky?

By
Frank Groeneveld
 – February 16, 2010Posted in: Webapps

Hey, do you have a Twitter account? Have you ever noticed those messages in which people tell you where they are? Pretty annoying, eh. Well, they’re actually also potentially pretty dangerous. I’m about to tell you why.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the whole location-aware thing. The information is very interesting and can be used to create some pretty awesome applications. However, the way in which people are stimulated to participate in sharing this information, is less awesome. Services like Foresquare allow you to fulfill some primeval urge to colonize the planet. A part of that is letting everyone know you own that specific spot. You get to tell where you are and if you’re there first, it’s yours. O, and of course there’s badges..

Foursquare Foursquare

The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you’re definitely not… home. So here we are; on one end we’re leaving lights on when we’re going on a holiday, and on the other  we’re telling everybody on the internet we’re not home. It gets even worse if you have “friends” who want to colonize your house. That means they have to enter your address, to tell everyone where they are. Your address.. on the internet.. Now you know what to do when people reach for their phone as soon as they enter your home. That’s right, slap them across the face.

To raise some awareness on this issue and emphasize how easy it is to retrieve this information let me introduce: http://www.pleaserobme.com. Have fun and please don’t hook up Foursquare to your Twitter account, okay?

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