Printer Friendly Version

Have a question about this article, object-oriented programming, or PHP? Visit Intranet Journal's Discussion Forum

Going Further

Here are some ideas for features to add to your PHP Intranet CMS:

• WYSIWYG editor: You probably don't expect your staff to learn HTML, so how can they create articles or other site content with formatting? There are a number of free editors that you can plug into your system, to provide a regular text box with edit buttons such as bold, underline and italic.



• Profiles: create a profiles table, that links to the cmsusers table created earlier. This will allow you to keep a staff directory, maintained by the staff themselves.



• Sections: In a previous article we assigned articles 'sections', to split up the site into categories. If the system were set up to allow certain users to be managers of those sections, then an infrastructure is put in place for keeping all areas of the site up-to-date.



• Communications: It's a good idea to use the Intranet as a communication tool; apart from anything else it encourages your users to read the site on a regular basis. Either use a public forum (which I don't suggest writing yourself, there are plenty of good ones freely available), or employ a private messaging system. This just needs to be a table containing a 'to', 'from' and 'message' column, with an Inbox page to pick up messages where the 'to' column matches the currently logged in user.

From calendars to surveys, your CMS can be extended in any direction you need. Implementing all the required features can take a long time, however. You won't have the many hours of testing that have gone into established CMS projects. But you do benefit from knowing what goes where, how each module operates, and how the parts of the system interact. This is especially useful when considering future expansion of your Intranet.

To demonstrate the techniques I've discussed in this series, a full Content Management System based on the code in the series can be found at http://www.ottercms.com . It hasn't been around for long and thus is in 'beta' release (i.e., untested and not advisable for business-critical systems). I'd encourage you to download it, look at the source code for inspiration, post your opinions in the forum, and perhaps even use it. For any other queries and comments about the series, see the IntranetJournal Forum.

I hope you've enjoyed the series and that it will be of some help. Good luck with your Intranet!