Explay CMS 3.0 alpha

Today, my patience burst and I wanted to show Explay CMS 3.0 to the world. It has been 8 months since I started making the 3rd version. In January, the core was  ready , only then it was still too early to talk about what could be done on it. CMS, of course, did not lose its sociality, and even acquired several new and interesting functions. Now I will tell you what has been achieved. Take a look and try, I hope, yourself :)

Opportunities

• Blogs
  
  • Adding publications of two types: article and link
  • The ability to "connect" to blogs, appoint administrators and moderators
  • Rating and commenting
  • User Rating Limitations
  • Drafts
  
  
• People / Users
  
  • Registration with confirmation by e-mail and without
  • Search by users
  • Small statistics
  • Ability to upload multiple avatars
  • Settings and password change
  • Ability to add friends
  • Friends feed is similar to VK news
  
  
• Email Notifications / Internal Mail
  
  • Notifications of responses to publications, photos, mail and comments (in the current version, e-mails themselves are not sent, but are added to the database)
  • Internal messaging is similar to Habrabru
  
  
• Photo gallery
  
  • Ability to create photo albums
  • Upload photos
  • Commenting
  • Planned user marks in photos
  
  
• Static Pages
  
  • Are present
  
  

Engine Features

The first and most important feature of the 3rd version is the architecture. I won’t describe it in detail now, if anyone is interested, I talked about her in  this topic . I’ll tell you only about “goodies”. The first is the ability to combine lists of displayed objects (remember the pages with topics and comments on the old Habr?). This feature, in my opinion, is a very useful and powerful tool that is already used in blog modules and in the completely new Lenta module. The second feature is the ease of module development. When developing modules, a relatively small number of functions and classes are used; you do not even need knowledge of SQL. There is already documentation to help developers. The third feature that I would like to highlight is caching. The assembly already includes two interfaces to the backends: Memcache and eAccelerator.

Disadvantages of features

Unfortunately, the engine is not from the category of lungs, and in both senses. Firstly, due to the specifics of the architecture, it is very demanding on resources, and without caching I would not put it on a working site, as they say, “beauty requires sacrifice”. Secondly, if the development of modules is quite simple (nevertheless requires a certain level from the developer), then XSLT templates are another matter. As far as I can imagine, quite a few layout designers work with XSLT, so the layout of a design can cost a pretty penny. Here I want to add that I myself do not have money for a server where you can deploy CMS with a test platform :)

Plans

In the near future, tighten up what is not tightened up and add a couple of little things, including invites. Perhaps, no new public modules are planned. Beta is just around the corner, and there is already a release. Starting with the beta version, I promise that there will be an update module, and after the release, the updates will not affect the templates. If I ever make an official site on the 3rd version, then there will definitely be a bug tracker and a repository of modules and add-ons.

Prior to version 3.1 there will be no administrative interface, but the most necessary settings will be available.

System requirements

• PHP 5
• MySQL 5
• XSLT
• mb_string
• mod_rewrite

Desirable: Memcache or eAccelerator.

Installation

You can download the alpha version or  see the source code on  Google Code .
Installation: upload files to the server, perform a database dump (dump.sql).
You can log in as admin / admin.

I try to write about all updates and innovations at http://explay.su

Test for health!

PS: of course I want to hear criticism comments. I would be very happy if you poke my nose into the error code.