[Gllug] Automatic CMS Generation: Ideas/Experience?

[gvim]

Walter Stanish wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> This is an admittedly ambitious and error prone task, and will never
> provide a 'silver bullet' solution, but does anyone have experience
> or ideas around automatically generating web based content management
> systems (CMS) from existing, prepopulated databases?
> 
> Basically I'm sick of writing/tweaking custom DB CMSs over time, so
> I'm attempting to build a tool to automate the process.  I've already
> got a proof of concept going, which works alright but now needs some
> extra work (deep thinking! database driver abstraction! etc...)
> 
> My approach is to generate a default UI using detected database 
> characteristics (foreign key relationships, various key types, 
> column types, etc.) with support for add/remove/edit/sort and
> some degree of 'prettification' (icons, capitalisation, etc.).
> 
> The default UI can then be reconfigured by storing preferences
> against that particular database, for example to hide particular
> tables or columns, or to provide dependent records as part of a
> parent record (think 'articles' and 'article_names' tables,
> the latter becomes a set of fields against each record of the
> former).
> 


Maybe Catalyst (Perl) would provide the greater flexibility you need. A new Catalyst book was published by Apress in July this year. Catalyst with DBIx::Class would provide the database abstraction and Template::Toolkit is excellent for generating custom front ends.

gvim
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