The Blog of Steven Scharf

Search Engine Update #1

Much was done this weekend to enhance the crawler, better porter stemming, indexing different file types allowing for image searches, pdf searches and more (coming soon) and it also will now find links and index them as well. It will now also index dynamic pages to give better results instead of sending users to gateway pages (like the blog index).

On the search engine side I added many options like phrase searches, go to first result, search all words seperated by a space or by a plus sign, exclude words preceded by the minus sign and due to better porter stemming algorithm's employed, better "What did you mean?" results.

So far I like the results, but I have much more to do. Adding categorical searching is next on the list followed by showing more statistics about results which will coincide with the category build giving results for each category...

New Search Engine in Beta

Today I launched a new toy. My PHP/MySQL Search Engine.
It's very basic right now but has a lot of potential. This was created from scratch. I also built a crawler for this CMS and it will crawl the entire site and index site content and meta-data. So far I have to work on relevancy a bit, MySQL does a great job on its own but I need to tweak it on the PHP side both with the Crawler and Search Engine.

I collect keywords and links so far and have removed JavaScript and other useless code. I have some Stop Words that I avoid when you search and have a "Did you mean?" feature available and also gives more then one word with a link to the search query of course...

Major User/Group Permissions System Update & More!

Many update's have been applied recently to this CMS. Most noteably is the Permission System. Many system's out there employ granular control over their permissions allowing Administrator's to create varying groups with whatever access they like.
My system employs much the same tactic with the added flavour that you can also give user's specific permissions which override the group permissions a user might have. Defaulting back to the group permissions is a click of a button.
The permissions you can give relates to each function within the administration area. Maybe you want to allow someone to add news, but not edit or delete? Maybe you want another Administrator but with one role while another group of Administrators fullfill another?
It's all simply achieved with checkboxes and the system allows for scalability quite easily using standard database methods and programming techniques...

User System Updates

There were quite a few updates made to the user system, common things such as password resets and account enable/disable. Changing your password is all AJAX based with a graceful fall-back for those of you with JavaScript off. Enabling/Disabling your account has no affect on your login, but it will affect whether or not your profile is viewable across the site. Once you're account is disabled it means you don't exist to the application. When you Enable your account it will show everything to everyone.

More granular control will be given over what you want shown and who you want it shown too. Privacy is important to my user's and even if it isn't I make it a priority. This is why we never send you your password and what is considered your private information is encrypted to today's standards...

Why build a CMS when there are many already available?

That's a good question which I have asked myself several times before delving into the development of it. The answer is quite simple for me: Most CMS systems are complicated, sometimes offer many things you don't need, sometimes they don't have what you do need so you have to develop it yourself.

As a developer building my own CMS brings personal satisfaction of knowing that product inside and out. I have the ability to make this work in a way which I find makes sense to me, also, allows me to produce it to others in a way that makes sense to them in a straightforward kind of way.

I want to "Dumb-Down" CMS installation, theme changes, hook-in's, plug-in builds while leveraging the latest array of technologies within these pieces such as HTML5, CSS3, JQuery/AJAX while following my own MVC Standards...