Question

Im looking for answers detailing theoretical approaches, so don’t worry about any technical specifics.

I am researching concepts to build a simple CMS and one thing I cannot decide is whether to use pure PHP with various libraries, or to build it on top of an MVC framework like Zend or Symfony.

My concern is that by building it on a framework would mean that template and content management would have to go through a custom layer of abstraction built by myself, the processing of which would be built on top of the framework, so that is essentially two layers of frameworks.

Is this a valid solution, or should the routing system be built from scratch, and simply use third party libraries for DBO abstraction and other useful tools for more specific components?

Thanks.

Answer 1

If you build a CMS using libraries, all you’ll be doing is reusing code that you would be coding yourself and possibly having a shorthand way of coding things. If you can easily break your code apart or code it from scratch again when the time comes, this shouldn’t be a problem.

But if you use a framework to write a CMS, it’ll give you a functionality for coding already included in it, such as MVC, testing, a templating language, ORM, maybe scaffolding, migrations, and other such things.