Use Framework in OS project?

[Kudose]

'ello all.

I've been tossing around the idea of creating a GNU application and want to make it something great, so I obviously need more than just myself working on it.

I'm not recruiting or anything here, I just need some advice on how to attack this.

The app will need to have modules, (positional)blocks, and plugins for the modules.

It's not going to be a CMS, as you may think from the previous sentence. It's going to be a base system ... a sort of application that implements blog, CMS, ecommerce, classifieds and other modules and plugins. Much like XOOPS, but stripped down even further and made more user/developer friendly.

I have been looking at CakePHP and Symfony; it really seems like overkill.

Is it best to build large sized applications with potentially multiple people working on them with a framework, or just well thought out MVC style coding?

Thanks. :)

[scross]

I'm slightly confused as to what you're trying to develop?? Are you talking about making some sort of framework, or perhaps a php application manager?? I'd be happy to help you with this project with any php coding, but I don't have all the time in the world.

If you're considering plugins then you need to design some sort of simple plugin API, so that applications/plugins can perform user operations and database operations (and others) easily. Generally the API would just be a class (or, when your application grows, a collection of classes), which would then probably be extended by each of the plugins so they had easy access to its functions. I guess I'd need more information to suggest a decent approach to it.

[Kudose]

Well, basically ...

I have been building and working with web software and have found the same needs for multiple projects, but never an all in one solution.

For example, I have some car dealer turn-key web software that the clients want a blog, store, classifieds and other things added in.

I thought it would be great to build a base "framework?" and build modules for it. Much like XOOPS.

For example, if I ran a car dealership, we would have the base framework, then install the CMS module for document management, the eStore module to sell our car parts, the Classifieds module to list items (cars, boats, houses, planes, fish, etc), etc...

So basically, right now, I am looking into creating a sort of framework that manages modules, users, etc...

Thanks much for the response. I hope this helps clarify things.

** edit **
I even want to go as far as login shares (SMF, vBulliten, OS Commerce, etc), message boards, etc...
** /edit **

[scross]

Oh ok, you're simply building a framework to handle common functionality in applications. The easy way to approach this is to use classes, generally one for each "module" or piece of functionality. For example, there would be a class for user authorization and another class for the database. Many php frameworks exist already so try to avoid re-inventing the wheel too much in your application.

[bubblenut]

I would suggest getting in contact with the framework developers. I would be very surprised if some of them were not interested in someone building a set of pluggable applications on top of their framework. You may even get it as part of the framework. It sounds like a very cool idea actually, the next logical step (so long as I am understanding you correctly). We have a lot of frameworks to help us build applications, but a set of application components which sit on top of a framework and can be plugged in when and where they're needed would be very very cool.

[scross]

I don't think that's completely new, the Zend Framework uses a bunch of components for database queries, user management, MVC coding etc. I guess if it was on an even higher level than this it would be new, but perhaps not so useful.