I second Cary's recommendation to go with a CMS. Another one to
consider is SilverStripe. It's highly extensible, though model
administration is done on the PHP level, so be prepared to open up your
favourite text editor and mind your syntax.
Ian Walls
Web Services & Emerging Technologies Librarian
UMass Amherst Libraries
On 04/29/2015 05:30 PM, Cary Gordon wrote:
My recommendations are:
Move to a CMS. Drupal has a large library community, and I have been
happily using it for ten years. You might find Joomla more to your liking,
or you could worship the claw and go to Wordpress, which is mammoth, but
not particularly developer friendly.
If a CMS is out of the question, consider using the Symfony framework,
which is similar in concept to Rails, but, IMHO, better constructed. I
think that it is the future of serious PHP development.
The great thing about using a framework is that it provides structure,
making it much easier to make the move to OOP.
FWIW, the forthcoming version of Drupal is built with Symfony and is the
start of Drupal's move from its "hook system" to more standard PHP
components, which will make it friendlier to PHP developers without
a Drupal background.
The ever-irascible Rasmus Lerdorf has declared that Drupal 8, paired with
PHP 7 will be unbeatably performant.
Cary
On Wednesday, April 29, 2015, Ken Irwin <kir...@wittenberg.edu> wrote:
Hello all,
I've just learned that the PHP mysql_* functions are all deprecated as of
PHP 5.5, and I'm trying to figure out what this means for my life. My
library's website is heavily database-driven, hand-coded, and all written
using the mysql_* functions. It's currently running PHP 5.4, so presumably
code all needs to be updated before the next server upgrade.
So I'm looking for a little advice:
1. Is there a general consensus on what the best long-term
alternative to the mysql_* functions is? I see a bunch of references to the
PDO extension, which is available on our server. Is that The Answer, or
should I be looking other places as well.
2. Does anyone have advice about how to proceed with an enormous
overhaul like this? I'm sure I'll be working on a development copy of the
server until everything is all worked out. But beyond that, advice would be
welcome. Have you employed students to do work like this?
3. I wonder what other broad-sweeping old-fashionednesses may also
be about to rear up and bite me. If you imagine that I learned procedural
(almost never object-oriented) PHP 4 in about 2000 and am slow to change my
ways, can you predict what sort of deprecated foolishness I might still be
perpetrating?
Any advice, input, or experience would be appreciated!
Thanks
Ken
