Extendable Content Management System (CMS)
During years of building complex web systems, we found out that most system need some core tasks (such as displaying text pages, handle users and permissions, etc.). In order not to write everything from scratch each time we builed a new system, we created a system that has the capabilities to perform all basic tasks. We now only need to write the specific scripts for the specific system. This is essentialy a Content Management System (CMS).
This web site and many other web sites are built using this software. Ori Idan's stories web site in English and in Hebrew are written using this system.
Why use this system instead of common CMS such as wordpress, Drupal etc.?
Other CMS's such as Drupal or wordpress, have been around much longer and thus have a larger installed base of users and programmers. Thus one can assume they will have less bugs and it would probably be easier to get support for them.
However there are still several advantages for using Helicon technologies CMS:
- True multi lingual system - This system can store different versions of the same page (one for each language). It also have the ability to remember the current page so when switching to another language, you immidiatly get the same page (if avialable) in the other language. For example, press the Israel flag on top of this page and see that you get this same page in Hebrew, that give the impression that the page was translated on the fly.
- Easy to change templates - Other system's template are essentially PHP files that require special knowledge in order to write them. This system's template files are simple HTML files (with few special tags). Thus creating a new template for this system requires knowledge of HTML and CSS only. No need to learn programming in any language.
- Easy to extend - Each page in the system can either be a content page (text and images) or a module file (PHP script). You only need to know PHP to write such a module. This PHP script should simply do it's task without taking care of putting the contents in the graphic design. This is taken care of by the system.
The system is so versatile that this system or our accounting system are both built using this system.
num_rows == 0) return; /* end of recursive call */ while($line = $result->fetch_assoc()) { $n = $line['num']; $query = "DELETE FROM comments WHERE num=$n"; $newresult = DoQuery($query, __LINE__); RecursiveDelete($n); } } function GetTimeStr($hour, $min, $sec, $month, $day, $year) { global $timeoffset; $time = mktime($hour, $min, $sec, $month, $day, $year, 0); $time += ($timeoffset * 3600); /* add time offset in seconds */ $str = date("d/m/Y H:i:s", $time); return $str; } /* | AddLinks: | Replace URL's in string with links */ function AddLinks($string) { $string = preg_replace("/(^|[^=\"\/])\b((\w+:\/\/|www\.)[^\s<]+)". "((\W+|\b)([\s<]|$))/i", "$1$2$4", $string); return preg_replace("/href=\"www/i", "href=\"http://www", $string); // $txt = preg_replace( "/(?\s]+)/i", "\\0", $txt ); // " } /* | Replace special codes in messages */ function SpecialCodes($str) { $str = stripslashes($str); $str = str_replace('<', '<', $str); $str = str_replace('|code|', '
', $str);
$str = str_replace('|CODE|', ' ', $str);
$str = str_replace('|ECODE|', '
", $str); $str = AddLinks($str); return $str; } /* | DisplayContents: | Show a string of section body, parsing dot commands | currently only one command is supported | .C that will start or stop code section */ function DisplayContents($contents) { $incode = 0; $contents = SpecialCodes($contents); $a = explode('
', $contents); foreach($a as $val) { if($val[0] == '.') { /* this is a command */ if($val[1] == 'C') { if(!$incode) { print "
\n"; } } if($incode) { while($incode) { print "
