I may have mentioned before how enthusiastic I was about some aspects of the system I built at Belton. This is especially true for the integrated editor - I took it to the point where it could actually generate new pages (complete with embedded dynamic code), populate a new htaccess file for clean URL’s, and then link it into the site in whatever menu you wanted, at any spot you chose. But…I disabled it and then quit since I didn’t want to be held responsible - people would inevitably try and edit a critical system file or something and, of course, I’d be to blame for their own ineptitude.
That editor lives on now; today I put it into version 0.1 of our new website. It’s even more powerful now; it generates *complete* XHTML pages instead of just generating containers for dynamic content. With the old system, the DB had to be queried to retrieve the menu structure. The new one only holds a pointer to it: it generates the navigation structure when asked to (Smarty-style) and spits it out into a php file for inclusion. Additionally, it can hold many instances of navigation bars for different sub-sections. This all means faster speed and fewer DB queries. You can navigate to the depths of site without instigating a single DB query in most cases, but all pages can be edited from one central interface.
I have to admit, it’s freaking awesome.
I’m also working on a system now where it will generate snapshots of its own pages. This way, you can build a new template in the integrated editor and it automatically makes it available with a preview in a repository.
