Bespoke CMS – Step by Step Guide – Part 1
Hello all, and welcome to my guide on creating a bespoke content-management system (CMS). My name is Rob and I form part of the e-commerce development team here at e-commercewebdesign.co.uk – part of the CreareGroup.
What I wanted to do for my first post was basically jump straight in at the deep end. I am going to give you a step-by-step guide to creating a bespoke CMS. Hopefully this will help you learn the ways of PHP/MySQL as well as understanding the nature of the customer’s site and anticipating any future changes and building in improvements as we go.
Of course what we need is to create (or at least plan out) an example website that requires bespoke functionality.
The most common request that we have had to incorporate into bespoke CMS designs is a “stage system”. What I mean by stage system is the systematic building of a complicated order. This could be the building of a kitchen, a conservatory or even a computer. To simplify it a bit – a bespoke CMS is only really needed when the product on sale is in itself bespoke.
So this is what we will be doing. We will be building a computer shop – “Complete Computers” – one that is bespoke and which allows us to select the hardware and software and we may even go so far as to personalize it – simply to show extra functionality on the part of the order process. We will also be validating each stage so that it only proceeds when each stage is completed to a satisfactory standard by the user.
The steps I will show you in this series of blogs will include all of the following and probably a lot more.
- Thinking ahead – covering your bases when it comes to database design
- Building and Testing our database
- Creating and Separating the front-end and back-end systems
- Creating the stage system
- Creating the session
- Creating the shopping cart
- Implementing the payment gateway
There are more areas to cover than this but hopefully this will give you all a taster of what is to come. If you have any suggestions or questions about any of this then don’t be afraid to post.
Thanks and hopefully you’ll look forward to my second instalment in a few days time – most likely called “Thinking Ahead” where we will go over all the possibilities of what our store could entail.
