On Webitech.net there's a new tutorial showing how to combine PHP and jQuery to create a simple content editing system when you don't need a full-blown CMS to manage the pages of your site.

I'm going to show you how to use jQuery and PHP to build a content editing system that will allow you or your client to easily edit .html pages visually. [...] Our file structure is going to be really simple - just admin.php, the wymeditor package and jquery together in the demo directory.

The tool uses PHP's file_get_contents to pull in the source of the page into a textarea and edit it with jQuery and the WYM Editor. Full code is included for your cut and paste pleasure but if you need a quicker fix, you can download the source. There's also a demo to see it in action.

There's a new post on Lukas Smith's blog where he talks about frameworks, phpBB's decision and building "gold on top of crap".

See the various symfony CMS solutions are an example of how wrong things can go. We now have several solutions whose architectural differences are either cosmetic or simply bad design decisions probably a result of trying to invent things in the small ecosystem of a company project team. So I was very happy to hear then that phpBB will adopt Symfony 2 for their next version. Hopefully this will become a role model for others.

He talks about how several of the popular CMS systems these days have worked harder on their external functionality than on the base (where they need the most work). He also looks towards a future where there are good, solid CMS solutions and leaders will emerge from the pack and provide quality content management for the PHP masses.

There's also some great discussion in the comments of the post with people who both share and disagree with some of Lukas' thoughts.

PHPBuilder.com has posted what they consider to be the top five content management systems written in PHP including Drupal and Joomla.

With solutions such as the Zend Framework and CodeIgniter making it easier than ever to create complex web applications, it can be tempting to flex your developer muscles and create custom framework-based solutions whenever the opportunity arises. However, the PHP community has also made great strides with another type of web development solution, as the content management system (CMS).

He looks at some of the key features of each and points out some of the more popular sites using them as a backend. He wants to give you a starting point to look into:

• Drupal
• ExpressionEngine
• Joomla
• Silverstripe
• WordPress

On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a recent post from Craig Buckler showing how to split up your WordPress content into two or more columns quickly and easily.

WordPress is a great CMS, but implementing some features within your theme can require a little lateral thinking. The content for your page or post is usually output by the theme code using a single function call. But what if you need to split the content into two or more blocks? That might be necessary if your theme requires multiple columns or sections on the page.

There's a built in call WordPress includes, "get_the_content", that returns the content rather than just echoing it out. With this handy function giving you just the content, you're free to split up the content however you want - on certain tags or as they suggest, using the "more..." tag and a few modifications to a few other scripts to split it out into DIV blocks.

Vance Lucas has an opinion on WordPress being named the best Open Source CMS by Packt Publishing recently.

My knee-jerk "how sad is that?" reaction comes not because I don't think WordPress is worthy, but because of what it implies about the state of other open source CMS projects. The reaction comes from the fact that a blogging platform is kicking your CMS's ass in its own category.

He points out that WordPress is, first and foremost, a blogging platform and that it has bridged the gap between blogging tool and CMS so well that it's winning in that category too.

The fact that I can go through literally hundreds of open source content management systems and still end up settling on WordPress because I know it's the only one that won't totally confuse my client is what's sad. Usability and ease of use matter.

In this new post from the IBuildings blog today Ivo Jansch looks at content management systems and how you can start to find that right fit for your and your company/organization.

At the moment, Wikipedia's list of content management systems features 137 unique CMS products. 59 of these are written in PHP. And that's only the ones that Wikipedia finds 'notable', which means these are the ones that have significant usage or large enough communities to be mentioned. [...] The sheer size of the CMS market is interesting when you consider that one of the most frequent questions we get at Ibuildings is: "What CMS do you recommend we use?"

In an experiment in his recent talk (at the IMS conference) he asked the audience which car he should purchase from his list of four. Of course, their answers were wrong because of one fact - no one asked about his requirements.

This is a definite first step to anyone looking for a CMS to fit their needs (or really any kind of software). He also mentions other criteria to consider like cost of ownership, technology required, features and functional requirements.

If you've ever wants an easy "drop in" kind of solution for helping to protect a portion of your site, you should check out this new post from Abhinav Singh about using the has_hmac functionality to do just that.

Many times a requirement arises where we are supposed to expose an API for intended users, who can use these API endpoints to GET/POST data on our servers. But how do we verify that only the intended users are using these API's and not any hacker or attacker. In this blog post, I will show you the most elegant way of adding content verification using hash_hmac (Hash-based Message Authentication Code) in PHP. This will allow us to restrict possible misuse of our API by simply issuing an API key for intended users.

You set up a private and public key for each of the users wanting to connect to the resource. They can then use the hmac functionality to set those over to the requesting page as a part of the message (GET/POST) where the public key is used to check the validity of the request and either allow or deny it.

New from the Content with Style blog today there's a quick tip from Matthias Willerich for phpMyAdmin users who are having issues viewing the content of blob data types.

n my phpMyAdmin installation, version 3.1.1, none of the old style config settings [...] had any effect, and the solution was terribly elusive. "view blob", "show blob", "display blob", all that Google suggested were people asking the same question, at various ages of the internet.

Finally, after wading through negative comments of forums and not getting much help at all, Matthias dug into the source and found a session variable that can be set to true and the content magically appears.

In his latest post to his blog Lukas Smith looks at what things users and developers seem to hate about most of the content management systems available today (not just PHP-specific either).

This is just a quick start for a brainstorming of what we all hate in todays CMS (I am including portal/community software here as well and I guess most also applies to web shops) software out there. I have written a very small CMS application myself ages ago so I do not have experience in what its really like writing and maintaining a big one. All I know is that its insanely painful to deal with any of them, though if your site is all about having admins managing tons of static content or end users wanting to interact, there is little way around these ugly beasts.

Other "hated things" he mentions include the way that admin settings set stored in databases, the choices most of the software have made on their model layer and the lack of a quality API to extend the base functionality of the application.

As a part of his messy breakup with Drupal for his content management system for a local brewing club he's involved with, Sean Coates has been shopping around for new software. He thought he might have found a possibility in SilverStripe, but ended up disappointed.

The site looks pretty good, the demo - while minimal (which is totally fine by me)-seems to work decently. It made my "to test" list. The bottom line: FWIW, SilverStripe made my "do not recommend" list today. A bunch of people replied asking "why?" This is my response to those people. My intent is not to bash SilverStripe, but to explain how it fell short of my wants and needs, quickly.

He looks at two of the major reasons why he'd suggest avoiding SilverStripe - bad code and issues with the installer.

I could probably fix that problem, and none of the other problems on their own are insurmountable, but combined, they leave me with the impression that the code isn't what I'd like to commit to maintaining. The search continues...