[kDev] Dear Santa, Content management guidance...

[Daniel Harris <daniel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Perhaps you can give me some guidance...

My biggest pain about updating the Kendra website is the process of  
SSHing in, CDing, VIing, etc. What I'd really like to do (in the  
short term) is edit the pages via a really simple webform - password  
protected, of course. Presuming that the pages would then reside in a  
database. Couple of issues though. These pages contain HTML and PHP  
(that access the database). Would this be acceptable in security  
terms? Also, presuming that a very slim PHP wrapper would pull out  
the pages from the database, could it then run PHP code within those  
"pulled out" pages?

What prompted this is partly the need to keep news fresh and on the  
front page. Currently all the news is webified in an archive of the  
email newsletter and it don't look that pretty. What I'd like to do  
is add news items to the front page as they occur and then at some  
point (possibly user defined (weekly, monthly...)) package them up  
and email 'em out. This necessitates a degree of programming. But the  
way the website is currently coded it's pretty laborious to code the  
new item, modify item forms and display routines.

Another constant issue is working with the database. What I'd really  
like to do is, for a given table/object/thingy, just specify a new  
field/attribute ONCE and then automatically have the field inserted  
into the database and the web forms (for entering and modifying the  
object) code and any results/list display code include this new field  
- all without me having to modify any code.

For example I created a form ( http://www.kendra.org.uk/event- 
details.php ) a while ago (much like the user profile form) at the  
moment it just emails text data. But I'd really like it to insert the  
content into the database, allow the author to edit the data via a  
web form and also display the data in a list - much like we done at  
http://www.kendra.org.uk/wiki/wiki.pl?FutureEvents

Fuelled by frustration, I've been constantly looking around for a  
content management system (Plone, Drupal...) that would enable user  
database entry, editing and result display and other things for our  
relatively simple setup and would scale and morph. But I'm concerned  
that whatever CMS we go with will at some point not work the way we  
want and will not be extendable - and then back to square one.

Or should we go with a web application framework (Ruby on Rails,  
Django...)? Would it help.

I know there's got to be a better way...

... and a merry xmas to you too!

Cheers Daniel