Frankencoding for the 20teens
November 27, 2014 2:48 PM   Subscribe

I want to build a site but don't want to code my own password reset scripts. Looking for recommendations for frameworks (are they called that?) or respositories for frankencoding a website. Also planning/prototyping tools that would let me describe what I want in plain language/mindmap style.

I know that Invision would let me prototype and describe functions visually (by dropping in designed pages) but design isn't paramount here right now, and I know that Bootstrap will provide a great package of responsive front-end stuff like css and buttons but I would love to find the equivelant for register, login, create a session (do we still do that?), user page, etc. Back in the day you rolled over to hotscripts.com and grabbed snippets to duct tape together, but I figured by this stage there must be decent, established, free-for-commercial-use alternatives that I can kinda plunk in and work on from there. For the record my very rusty and limited backend skills relate to php, so I would probably want to stick with that.

This is for a project that will have a user side where they register the details of various thing and an admin side that views, confirms, interacts etc with those details. Hope everyone is having a lovely turkeyday.
posted by Iteki to Computers & Internet (6 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: Drupal
posted by animalrainbow at 2:51 PM on November 27, 2014 [2 favorites]


Best answer: Definitely sounds like a CMS. Drupal sounds good for you from what you have written here, but there are many open source options. No need to paste anything together, things are much easier now.
posted by ssg at 3:40 PM on November 27, 2014


Best answer: I'm a Ruby on Rails and iOS/Mac Developer (it's been a long time since I've touched PHP), but if you're looking to build something from scratch it's useful to know that there's a lot of time to be saved by finding open source projects on GitHub and installing them via Package/Dependency Managers.

People have likely created open source libraries for just about any part of a site you're interested in creating, which you can find on GitHub. Other people have created simple tools that fetch and install the particular libraries that you're interested in for your build.

Ruby has RubyGems, iOS/Mac has CocoaPods... and it looks like the PHP community has Packagist and Composer?
posted by adamk at 9:23 PM on November 27, 2014 [1 favorite]


Best answer: In concert with others above, why do everything from scratch when you can have this functionality and more in a few minutes with Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal?

All are open source, based on php, free-for-commercial-use, and still have enough to roll up your sleeves and get dirty with code if you feel like it. Plus, if you get hit by a bus, you can be easily replaced by someone else who won't have to wade through Frankencode to keep your baby running.

However, if you're looking for a high-quality repository that's mostly free-for-commercial-use, Github is your friend. Here's the first thing that came up when I plugged "log in script" into DDG.
posted by dozo at 5:46 AM on November 28, 2014


Best answer: If you are doing login and you don't know how to make one secure, please don't try to roll your own, and make sure that whatever system you do use uses salted, secure hashes for passwords, and please use HTTPS for at least the login portion of the site (if not the whole thing). If a CMS like drupal is too heavy for your needs, I'd suggest looking for a framework that includes built-in authentication code. I haven't touched PHP in a while, so I don't have specific recommendations, but I'd take a look at this list of PHP frameworks as a starting point though.

Another option you might consider is using OAuth to allow someone to log in with a Google, Facebook or Twitter (or any other OAuth-supporting) account. That way, you don't have to worry about validating and storing credentials yourself.
posted by Aleyn at 1:35 PM on November 28, 2014


Response by poster: Ok, thanks, it really does sound that Drupal is the go-to suggestion. I have used other CMS like Wordpress and built my own babycms/blogplatform back in the day, I didn't really thing of it as a framework to hang this project on. The security aspect is a major part of why I don't want to home-roll even this prototype setup.
posted by Iteki at 7:28 AM on November 29, 2014


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