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Looking for Web Design Tool
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Sep 12, 2009, 08:32 PM
 
Looking for tool that will connect to mysql and create php web page visually. Similar to myPHPadmin. Any suggestions?

Suggest a good web dev forum?
     
besson3c
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Sep 12, 2009, 10:00 PM
 
You mean phpMyAdmin. How do you expect a visual editor to query and process the data in your database tables? No such product exists (that I'm aware of) because no offense, but this is a silly idea. Just learn enough PHP or Ruby or whatever floats your boat to query the database table(s) yourself, and enough HTML to produce the output you wish instead of spending this same amount of time looking for shortcuts.
     
turtle777
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Sep 12, 2009, 10:30 PM
 
What *exactly* do you wan to do anyways ?
What data is stored in mysql ?

-t
     
MacOS  (op)
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Sep 13, 2009, 11:29 AM
 
I like to be able to drag & drop mysql field onto the page and have the php code created. Just like it does for HTML.
     
turtle777
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Sep 13, 2009, 11:37 AM
 
Uhm, I don't think it works that way...

-t
     
besson3c
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Sep 13, 2009, 02:56 PM
 
Turtle is right, there are waaayyyy too many variables and details to automate something like that in any sort of useful way.
     
Synotic
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Sep 13, 2009, 08:09 PM
 
Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
Turtle is right, there are waaayyyy too many variables and details to automate something like that in any sort of useful way.
Not necessarily. If you view your database as a set of related data models that you can visually manipulate and present on your website, then there are a few tools that can help you do that.

Depending on what you want to do, take a look at Drupal. It can't necessarily work with an existing database that you have, but you can create data types and then views that will display your data. Pages will be generated that let you modify and extend your data sets. In a lot of ways, Drupal abstracts away what might be considered basic, PHP-based content websites. You can always go down to the chrome, but you usually don't need to.

There's a learning curve, but it's not unreasonable if you're looking for something more general and visual like Drupal rather than something more specific, like Wordpress.
     
besson3c
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Sep 15, 2009, 03:20 AM
 
Originally Posted by Synotic View Post
Not necessarily. If you view your database as a set of related data models that you can visually manipulate and present on your website, then there are a few tools that can help you do that.

Depending on what you want to do, take a look at Drupal. It can't necessarily work with an existing database that you have, but you can create data types and then views that will display your data. Pages will be generated that let you modify and extend your data sets. In a lot of ways, Drupal abstracts away what might be considered basic, PHP-based content websites. You can always go down to the chrome, but you usually don't need to.

There's a learning curve, but it's not unreasonable if you're looking for something more general and visual like Drupal rather than something more specific, like Wordpress.

As true as this may be, at some point one has to consider whether learning something like Drupal for what could be a very simple webpage might amount to more work than simply learning the PHP? After all, your most basic PHP db connect + query + loop through results is a mere few lines of code, and there are oodles of examples and how-tos online and elsewhere.

I'm not trying to dismiss your suggestion, just throwing another variable into the picture.
     
Warren Pease
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Sep 15, 2009, 02:01 PM
 
Not a huge fan of CakePHP but I do use it at work and it might be the "shortest distance" between having a mysql database and showing views.

Cake has a console function, called ./cake/bake that behave's like RoR ./script/generate . Using that command, you can scaffold models, controllers and views for any database field. The only pre-requisite for this autogeneration is that you can connect to the database properly. You can manually set up associations in the model class, or do so directly from the console.

It's not the prettiest scaffold, but in under 5 minutes, you can have an app with several associated models generated from a database table with controller and rendered CRUD views. I use this function to get started and then customize views as needed for the application.

I would recommend Drupal if the site aims to be a simple blog. Anything more complicated than that and it stops being easy in my experience.
( Last edited by Warren Pease; Sep 15, 2009 at 02:10 PM. )
     
Synotic
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Sep 16, 2009, 12:17 AM
 
Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
As true as this may be, at some point one has to consider whether learning something like Drupal for what could be a very simple webpage might amount to more work than simply learning the PHP? After all, your most basic PHP db connect + query + loop through results is a mere few lines of code, and there are oodles of examples and how-tos online and elsewhere.
I wouldn't say that learning PHP + MySQL is simpler than using Drupal .

What frameworks like Rails, Django, and Drupal (which is a pseudo in-the-web framework) offer are essentially database abstraction, templating, form processing and validation, and often some form of permalink configuration. Apart from possibly database abstraction, all of these are necessary for any decent CMS-y type site. Although you could dump all of your data into a database, and then query it and spit it out on the page, it seems to me (and framework writers) that this kind of coding is wasted effort. It could be argued that this kind of training is useful for learning things the first time, but I'm not sure that doing it over and over for each project is productive. If you've ever collected your validation functions or templating code (or used something like Smarty), you're essentially using a framework.

I've spent a lot of my time writing PHP+MySQL based web applications, and I'm convinced that one-off PHP+MySQL sites have seen their prime. If you have a new idea for form validation or database abstraction, you should roll it into its own project that you can support, reuse, and benefit from. But if you're writing a templating engine just to get a blog set up, you're probably doing something wrong. And if you're not using a templating engine, you're also probably doing something wrong .

There's really nothing specific about what frameworks offer and that's why they exist. If you're writing a web application, you should focus on what makes your application unique. The rest is a solved problem (or at least something you can contribute to).

Originally Posted by Warren Pease View Post
I would recommend Drupal if the site aims to be a simple blog. Anything more complicated than that and it stops being easy in my experience.
If your intent is to make a blog, I'd use Wordpress over Drupal. Drupal does have a learning curve (and also forces us code-slingers to challenge a lot of our assumptions about web development). But I would disagree that its use ends there. I think that Drupal is pretty much good for any kind of CMS type website where users of different roles can contribute arbitrary content to. Ride boards, classifieds, wikis and online catalogs are some examples.

But Drupal has two problems — conceptual unfamiliarity and a poor interface. For the latter, I'm hopeful for what Mark Boulton is doing with Drupal 7. For the former, I think the main issue is that its approach is very different (but surprisingly logical and powerful) from almost every tool out there. I don't know of another framework quite like Drupal. Having used it, however, I think that tools are going to begin resembling Drupal a lot more than not. It's the first, but hopefully not the last. But that's just my opinion .
     
besson3c
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Sep 16, 2009, 12:37 AM
 
Originally Posted by Synotic View Post
I wouldn't say that learning PHP + MySQL is simpler than using Drupal .

What frameworks like Rails, Django, and Drupal (which is a pseudo in-the-web framework) offer are essentially database abstraction, templating, form processing and validation, and often some form of permalink configuration. Apart from possibly database abstraction, all of these are necessary for any decent CMS-y type site. Although you could dump all of your data into a database, and then query it and spit it out on the page, it seems to me (and framework writers) that this kind of coding is wasted effort. It could be argued that this kind of training is useful for learning things the first time, but I'm not sure that doing it over and over for each project is productive. If you've ever collected your validation functions or templating code (or used something like Smarty), you're essentially using a framework.

I've spent a lot of my time writing PHP+MySQL based web applications, and I'm convinced that one-off PHP+MySQL sites have seen their prime. If you have a new idea for form validation or database abstraction, you should roll it into its own project that you can support, reuse, and benefit from. But if you're writing a templating engine just to get a blog set up, you're probably doing something wrong. And if you're not using a templating engine, you're also probably doing something wrong .
Hence all of the PHP toolkits that either push you or force you towards a more MVC approach, I guess. I don't disagree with you here, I guess my original impression was that the original poster didn't want to create a CMSey site, but just wanted to spit out the results of a table or two to a page. We're probably both parsing and assuming too much here though, since the original poster hasn't provided more info.
     
   
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