What is ProSiteManager

The goals of this project have always been relatively the same. A strong, multi-functional, and customizable website framework. The project has had many evolutionary rewrites over the years. It would fall to the side when not needed, then get a fresh rewrite when it's needed for a new website. It's not all bad. This evolution, and now a convert to an object orientated framework, it's gotten better defined and built upon proven techniques. The portal framework is now (March, 2013) preparing for a rollout on a few thousand Minecraft websites.

Early history

Gosh, it's hard to think back that far. The project was actually started when I was approached by a group of highschoolers online, starting a website, TheWebmasterGuy.com. They had a great artist, and staff, then they had me, the new web master. It started out as a news and articles based website, and the php consisted of a simple framework and a few functions. From the very start, a few noteworthy things are still done the same way today. The use of ?page=home is still very similar, although the code has had many improvements. The html files have always been in nearly the same directory structure, and have always loaded from .php files. At one point, in the development of a prototype portal, .tpl files were attempted, and worked well. These were just .html files with extra {tags}. To ease the burden on programmers, it has always defaulted to .php files and .tpl was soon removed. My general feeling is, auto generated html is very messy. This project will be in support of the diligent programmer, rather than the Microsoft Word export. So html has always been stored in php files. Either returned as a string, returned from within a function, or now contained in a class function.

old description

I'm a developer with a few websites I commonly work on. As I update and improve the code for one website, it's a really huge pain of a task to go back and do the same improvements to all the other websites. It's to easy to fix a bug on one website then forget or miss it on another.

To make things much easier on myself, I developed a universal core with all the features, functions, and modules I commonly use in all my websites. Each website uses the exact same core code, and every page and image of the site is loaded via the core's index.php file. It's designed to use drop-in content in the html folder. The core finds the html and images to load, and loads any modules that are needed for that page. Each site uses the same modules, but are customized by changing settings for each site.

To push an update to a live website, I log in to ssh and run the command ./update.bash and all the changes are patched into the files using subversion. The site could be updated without subversion just by dropping in the new core files or html/configs.

The code has gone through many changes over the years, but the soul purpose has stayed the same. It has faded away and returned a few times, but it still gets the job done, so it's still updated and in use.

ProSiteManager is currently in use on this site and a few others:

• SchematicsForFree.com
• GrowControl.com

Feel free to email me your comments, or request a copy. I don't have a zip package to post, but if it's requested, I'll put one together.