I need to create a blog-type application...

[Mr Pickles]

I am working on a project within my company IT department regarding a weekly online report to the group and I couldnt think of presenting it in any better way then blog style. It would be rather simple, but my boss gave me one stipulant: it must be all in-house, meaning I can't use blogger, wordpress (even though it doesnt use anything externally) or anything else.

Have any of you whipped out notepad and done anything relatively close with some .php? Any ideas or suggestions on making this task a little easier?

 

[Nothinman]

Ask your boss why he likes wasting your time and try to convince him to use one the already written ones.

 

[Mr Pickles]

I don't have to ask him, I know why. We're a small yet publicly traded company that relies on resources within to handle small tasks such as this. I can do it, I was just wondering if there was anyone else that has done something like this and if they had any tips.

Ask yourself why you respond to a suggestion request topic with worthless suggestions.

 

[Nothinman]

Because it's not a worthless suggestion, reproducing even small things like this internally for no good reason is retarded and costs the company more than it could ever save. Especially since most of the blogging software is open source so it's not like you can't take one and make any changes that you might need internally.

 

[Drakkon]

its pretty simple though...i mean just need an admin page to enter blog entries + a database retrieval script to get them all. The more fancy features are what ends up taking the most time.
heres a great little start though : http://www.devshed.com/c/a/MySQL/Creati...Script-for-a-PHPMySQL-Blogging-System/

 

[clamum]

Originally posted by: Drakkon
its pretty simple though...i mean just need an admin page to enter blog entries + a database retrieval script to get them all. The more fancy features are what ends up taking the most time.
heres a great little start though : http://www.devshed.com/c/a/MySQL/Creati...Script-for-a-PHPMySQL-Blogging-System/

Yup.

Basically have an admin section that has a textbox that you can type your report into. Then the script takes the current date/time and the inputted text and inserts it into a database (MySQL is free and works great).

Your "view" page then just queries the database for the reports and displays them. You could sort by date or have archives after a particular date, etc etc. Depends on how fancy you want to get.

This would be extremely easy to do in PHP and MySQL.

 

[Mr Pickles]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Because it's not a worthless suggestion, reproducing even small things like this internally for no good reason is retarded and costs the company more than it could ever save. Especially since most of the blogging software is open source so it's not like you can't take one and make any changes that you might need internally.

are you done?

Originally posted by: Drakkon
its pretty simple though...i mean just need an admin page to enter blog entries + a database retrieval script to get them all. The more fancy features are what ends up taking the most time.

Neat little site, that would be a perfect start. Thanks Drak.

 

[Atheus]

Can you not even incorporate open source code? Not even for the text editor? Have either you or your boss considered how much time and money it is going to take to write a full featured text editor in javascript? Or how easy and *free* and *public* tinyMCE is?

I'm leading a team writing a full content management system right now and we never even considered scratch building the editor... why would you do it for such a small site?

/edit: if you really want to do it feel free to ask me questions. my brain is full of this stuff right now.

 

[txrandom]

I made my website basically like a blog from scratch.

I made some websites that were admin only by implementing password protection with PHP's sessions. After that I just use MySQL inserts/deletes to control everything else. It's pretty simple.

 

[screw3d]

Nothinman has a good and valid point. Not much point reinventing the wheel, especially when the available open source solutions are much more secure and polished.

 

[Nothinman]

are you done?

Nope, you?

 

[Mr Pickles]

Didn't mean to abandon this yesterday.

Because we rely so heavily on our own developers, I can recycle things that have already been created within the company. I have 3 text editors to choose from and plenty of cake stuff like css that I use over and over that helps with neat picture borders and efficiency in general. Now did someone before me follow the rules and create the text editor I'm going to use from scratch or did he\she copy and paste? Who knows.

I apologize for saying scratch considering I can use any resource that is in-house.

Really, this isn't that big of a deal. Granted, it would take me all of a 10 minutes to upload wordpress, but I can probably have something up looking pretty good in about 3 hours. The interest of this project doesn't primarily reside in how much money they waste on me fiddling around on a computer; this is small time stuff. The interest is really in me learning how to do this quickly and neatly. Most of the time when we have projects like this, I need to document in detail every step I take. This gives them what they need to pass the practice off to some new guy after they can me and that's pretty valuable stuff.

I can't stress enough that this is no big deal. Most companies have some sort of a venture department that literally sits around trying to do things like this. The drive isn't always money when you've allotted the capital for it. The breakthroughs that others find with larger projects using similar principles are invaluable to the company. From the extreme other end of the spectrum - think of google beta... wtf do those guys do? Pretty much the same thing on a larger scale.

I'll dig this up on monday or tuesday when I'm done and reply with SS's

 

[sourceninja]

Check out cakephp, it is an application framework and their tutorial is on how to make a blog.