Creating A Content Management System (CMS)

Any good CMS will have five key functionalities:

1. ADD – create a new record
2. VIEW – view existing record(s)
3. EDIT – update a existing record
4. DELETE – delete an existing record
5. SEARCH – search for existing record(s)

In this training module, we will implement these functionalities.

To make pages more secure, user authentication pages can also be implemented:

1. Login – allow users to login
2. Logout – allow users to log out
3. Registration – allow users to register

Introduction

SPECIAL NOTE: Generic terms will be used (e.g., delete_page.php instead of deleteEmployeePage.php) in the main code to make the code reusable. For example, generic terms can refer to employee, student, worker, etc. So if you wanted to make another app from this one, you would not have to update these references since they are generic.

All the CRUD operations (create, read, update, and delete) will be done on separate pages. The front end work is done with HTML, CSS, jQuery, and jQueryMobile. The back-end work is done with a mySQL database using PDO (PHP Data Objects) extensions to help connect to the database and perform the select, insert, update, and delete operations using prepared statements.

CORNELIUS’ CONCISE CONDENSED CRUD GRID

	C	R	U	D
CRUD Operations	Create	Read	Update	Delete
App Functions	Add	View	Edit	Delete
SQL Statements	INSERT (INTO)	SELECT (fetch)	UPDATE	DELETE
All operations, functions, and statements deal with getting and setting records from a database. (e.g., create record, add record, insert record, etc.). Sometimes you see the acronym SCRUD where the “S” represents Search (e.g., search or filter a record or records from a database)

To recreate a CMS you typical create a series of pages that include recordset(s) (sometimes called resultsets), business logic code with SQL statements, etc.

Below is a summary of what is typically needed when creating these pages:

	Page	Recordset(s) Needed	Record(s) Returned	SQL Statement	SQL Filter
1	master_page.php	1	Many	SELECT	N/A
2	detail_page.php	1	1	SELECT	WHERE
3	add_page.php	1	N/A*	INSERT	WHERE
4	edit_page.php	2	1	SELECT / UPDATE	WHERE
5	delete_page.php	N/A	N/A	DELETE	WHERE
6	search_page.php	1	One to Many	SELECT	WHERE
7	index.php (Login)	1	1	SELECT	WHERE
8	logout.php (LogOut)	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
9	registration_page.php	1	1	INSERT	WHERE
* Not applicable unless you want to dynamically populate form elements. The logout does not use any SQL.