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PHP

Best way to add site to CMS?

I have a working website done in front-end code (html/css/javascript) but it currently has no admin/backend. Now I would like to learn how to build a back-end with CMS for that website so everything can be managed from there.

What is the best and easiest way to learn this? I don't want to do this via Wordpress but rather learn how to code my own CMS or use some framework and work from there, so I could later build on more complex features as I advance in learning.

How should I proceed and is there a complete tutorial like this on Treehouse? I'm assuming I should be learning PHP for this first or can a beginner rather start directly with Ruby?

6 Answers

This is quite a specific task!

Treehouse has got loads of stuff on Wordpress so maybe you could start there.

It seems like the most logical step to take before converting to a CMS like wordpress is to learn about that CMS first. I'd be surprised if you found a video tutorial out there that matched exactly what you're looking for!

Steven Ventimiglia
Steven Ventimiglia
27,371 Points

I never liked Wordpress. In fact, I hated it. Then, over the years, I started to realize that it has it's place in development.

It's basically a matter of figuring out whether you want to redo something that's already been built, tested, updated and fixed. Especially when there's a wide community of other developers that could possibly support anything original that you coded to work with it.

It's kind of like FlexSlider to me. Sure, if you wanted to, you could spend a year and a day creating your own responsive slider. But, why?

So, why not attempt to construct your own, personal contribution to the industry? Something we've never seen. Along the way, you may even figure out whether PHP or Ruby is more suitable to the future of the project.

I'm leaning more towards the custom CMS or perhaps any PHP framework so I could later on develop and learn some more advanced features for a website that's pretty complex.

I have heard that Django - A Python framework - can be great for this sort of mission. You would have to learn Python though, but Python is really cool.

If you want to use PHP, I have heard good things about Laravel.

Is there a tutorial like this on Treehouse or elsewhere where I have a finished front-end website and want to integrate in into a CMS framework?

If you want to learn to code it yourself. the PHP Track here in Treehouse is a great place to start. In my opinion it's one of the best Tracks that i did here on Treehouse, because you're doing one Projekt (a T-shirt Store) form the scratch to a quite advanced level.

By the way you learn Php, Databases, and the View-Model-Controller-Concept which is useful for almost every bigger site or app you might be doing in the future.

If you do some of the courses a few times, then you really have a great foundation for back end development and you'r in a better position to decide which way you want to go from there.