CMS Development Blog

Control Panel theme

Amol Gupta — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:53:01 +0000

The control panel theme needs the following features:

Soft on the eyes

Easy to navigate

Good looking

There are a lot of things to be kept in designing a good control panel theme and for sure google is the one who has cared about all this and made quality products .So,We decided to do it the google way and design a theme which would look similar to the ones used by google.

I came across a theme which looks like google chrome (and a bit like google wave) and is easy to navigate and use.

After all the tweaking and customizing of the theme,here is what we got:

WYSIWYG editor

Amol Gupta — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:31:06 +0000

When the user wants to write a post/page he would like to write without any code as if it was a word processor,but all the webpages need to be stored into html format.To convert normal text and images into HTML code directly a javascript program called WYSIWYG editor is used which parses the text and adds HTML tags accordingly. A good WYSIWYG editor also displays the HTML code symultaniously.
A lot of editors are available freely for download and we choose “WIDGEDITOR” by Cameron Adam

because its easy to use and customize.

After tweaking and editing it according to the requirements and looks this is what we got:

The converted html code is put into the database and displayed on the frontend.All images and media are stored in the html text with their locations referenced.

The Default theme

Amol Gupta — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:03:17 +0000

Just like evry other CMS has a default theme which is the first page the user sees after installing the CMS on the server, we also needed a default theme.

A default theme must be very simple to use and has minimal requirements on the part of the end user.We prefered to have a more shiny theme instead of a totally vanilla theme.So I searched the net and found a cool theme named Glossy Blue by ndesign-studio.After some tweaking of the theme,here is what we got:

There are a lot of other themes which will be made for the project and my team is working on themes.We plan to build theme for photoblogs,video/podcasts , magazine etc…All suggestions are welcome.

Sample Database

Amol Gupta — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 16:32:14 +0000

This might not be the first step to develop a content management system but still I felt the need to have it with me before I could start with the coding of php scripts.So a sample database was created first with the following tables after studying the tables of wordpress,drupal and joomla:

Posts

Pages

Catagories

Comments

Links

Variables

themes

users

media

Although all these tables may be insufficient but for the development of a basic system these are sufficient.The variables table stores all the global variables which will be needed all the time.the names of other tables tell what they are all about.