README

THIS PACKAGE IS NOW ABANDONNED. A REPLACEMENT HAS BEEN MADE SUCCESSFULLY BUT NOT YET PACKAGED. THE NEW SYSTEM ALLOWS JSON GENERATION AND SOME OTHER FEATURES LIKE WIDGETS AND PLUG-INS. FOR THE MOMENT, THIS NEW PACKAGE NOT YET NAMES IS IN PRODUCTION ON MY WEBSITE BUT I HAD NO TIME TO CREATE A SUITABLE PACKAGE.

johannes is a new CMS based on some ideas provided by Wordpress. But quite different. Written in PHP but it is conceived to be agnostic and mustache-centric. It means that the system is driven by templates written in Mustache.

Product in development. This project is NOT for production. If you want to help, free to you. If you need help, please open an issue.

Why johannes?

The name is based on the first name of Gutenberg, the inventor of the modern printing. Usually I do not try to waste time on findinng names for my projects.

Why PHP? Why Mustache? Why not Wordpress?

Because, my main projects are in PHP. That's why, I decided to use this language. But, basically, I admit nodeJS or other language are quite good to develop such system. PHP is well suitable for installation everywhere including very small servers.

The usage of Mustache is to protect the system of the XSS injection. Basically, everything is HTML escaped when you use the PHP mustache engine. This is a very good security for PHP programmers. From the beginning, PHP is outputting plain HTML. If you have bad data in the database, you can inject scripts directly on your page. This can be very dangerous. On the other hand, HTML can be easily printed with the triple bracket. That's a technical big advantage.

Mustache has a big advantage over all the other systems: it is agnostic but providing all I need to render a page. That's fine. The fact the template exists in many other languages like Javascript, Java, Ruby and many others is a good insurance to move from PHP to another language with a limited number of changes in the renderer.

Wordpress is very good to create blogs and other stuff. You can do everything you want with a good facility but the plugins and themes rely too much on programming. I mean, we use everytime PHP calls with high risks to have piracy. If you use themes and already done templates (including plugins), you could be blocked at some point. You take the risk to use old stuff. Even on paid templates, you can find missing translations (I work in French mainly).

Having a basic renderer using templates and quite fast is a good way to start a website. The power of administrating users is delegated to another project (not an open source, sorry). Then the main usage of Johannes is to render pages quickly and with minimum coding. Reducing the code of my pages to the minimum.

Wordpress relies on MySQL (or MariaDB) and I love programming in MongoDB. That's why Wordpress was not my main choice. But I have respect for this product because it's just amazing to see the power of this CMS.

How it works?

As for WordPress, the project relies on themes (stored in a dedicated repository called "themes"), and plugins (you will find them in the directory "plugins"). Then, you can add or change themes easily.

Using a theme, you rely on templates to render the page. Then, as for Wordpress, you can have different templates. Wordpress relies mainly on a limited number of pages (blogs, normal pages, archives...). Same on Johannes. We use templating with some rules.

Mustache is the driver for rendering pages. This is the main difference between WordPress and Johannes. Wordpress is relying on pure PHP rendering. That's a very good idea but writing themes is more complicated. Writing themes for Johannes should be kept very simple.

Note the code for running Johannes is very light. You just have to create a PHP page and adding this stuff:

//
// In a dedicated init.php file
//

$cms = new Johannes\CMSEngine(); // Create the engine
$cms->init();  // init the engine
$cms->setTheme("brave"); // select the theme

$cms->useTemplate( "basic" ); // The basic page
$cms->setTitle( _("Welcome") ); // Set title...
 	
$cms->push("app", $app ); // Add data (can be instances of classes, anonymous functions or arrays)
$cms->run(); // render the page

The database

That is another point: WordPress relies on MySQL only to store its information. Johannes doesn't rely on a database. Everything is file-related. But, of course, you can use any database if needed because the code is not on the CMS side (in the first version at least).

Due to Mustache, everything is really JSON-oriented. It means a MongoDB database is really the best choice. But redis or simply JSON written files are also a possibility.

The fact the database is NOT part of the CMS is based on the fact this CMS has been written to render the pages of the office240.com website. This website relies on API calls and on business-oriented classes (rather than the classic databases requests). Then evrything is data-realted and we can inject the code directly.

Dependencies

We tried to limit the dependencies with other project. But we intensively rely on the Concerto project which is already in production for another website (having about 1000 visits per day). And, of course, on the Mustache PHP project.

Frequently Asked Questions

When I try a new product, I have several questions. Here my answers.

Is it working?

Yes. The project is already in production on office240.com, then you can use it. And we think to develop it.

Is it complicated to configure

Not really. You just have to specify the ROOT directory dedicated to Johannes (to store the themes, the templates, the plugins). By default, it is based on $DOCUMENT_ROOT/cms where $DOCUMENT_ROOT is the root of your pages.

NOTE: you must store the files inside the visible part of your website to ensure a correct access for assets (CSS, javascript and images files).

wrey75 / johannes

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