A Google Drive CMS (in PHP) | Hacker News Reader

A Google Drive CMS (in PHP)

github.com

8 pointsahmednuaman8 comments

>I work on a lot of projects where my clients use Google Drive to update copy leaving me to then either update a CMS or some flat JSON/XML/YAML files. I could risk allowing my clients to update flat files but if I had £1 for every time a JSON/XML/YAML file didn't validate, well, I'd have about £38.

The rational solution is to do what everyone has been doing since the dawn of the web, which is to provide an admin interface, no?

This whole thing, to me, looks like a case of "just because you can, doesn't mean you should." At the same time, it's a novel and creative approach which gives it a cool factor.

True, really it was to do with the fact that a client of mine wondered why they couldn't use Google Drive to keep a site up to date.

The beauty of Drive is that all the hard work (auth, wysiwyg, media files) is all done for you, and it's secure and easy to share files; hence this only taking me a few days to complete.

How are the access times compared to a traditional setup? I imagine that it's not too bad as google has some serious hardware behind their effort.

I like the idea but I couldn't get it running on my localhost, I'm guessing it has to do with the fact yours was in a subdirectory and mine was at the root. I even tried fiddling with the .htaccess file removing the hardcoded reference to the subfolder.

Anyways I am curious why you choose to write the whole base of the CMS from scratch instead of building on top of a framework like Laravel, Yii, CI, or one of the countless ones out there. One that could have given your CMS 90% of what you needed and allowed you to build your idea faster and more efficiently?

Apologies for that, add an issue and I'll have a test to check that it works. There are a number of factors for getting it to work at root but usually you just need to update the config.php and .htaccess files.

You're right about a framework, I could've written it in one but to me this was a learning exercise and making it "as hard as possible" has allowed me to try and think about best practice and writing good code (which I hope I've done).

I respect your mision to make it "as hard as possible" and understand where you are coming from. My opinion is that a framework lets you follow a ton of best practices by default and helps you from reinventing the wheel. That said I do like what you have done, I am going to give it another try when I get a chance.

I've added some instructions on how to get it to run at root: https://github.com/ahmednuaman/gdrive-cms-php#how-can-i-make...

Other languages coming soon!

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