And then I did not notice the elephant. The story of the neglected Djem CMS

After reading a lot of topics dedicated to the choice of cms, freymovrka or writing them from scratch - I decided to share my story and at the same time shed light on the undeservedly deprived CMS Djem, because despite the presence of its developers on Habré, it is only briefly mentioned in the comments, and indeed in addition to the official website djem.ru there is practically no information on the Internet.

Foreword

And so about everything in order. Like many novice programmers a certain number of years ago, I wrote my CMS on which, surprisingly, I was able to create not only a couple of my own sites, but also perform regular orders for developing a site as a free-lancer. As time went on, the system was finished, more and more new sites were made (a total of about 40), and at one fine moment I realized that the time had come to choose - either I was developing cms or developing sites. Of course, the choice fell in favor of the second, because it fed me =) I was faced with the question of choosing a platform and I began to remember everything with what at least had to work in passing over the years ... A little earlier I had the honor to participate in the development of a large advertising site designed in the image similarity to www.bbc.co.uk where Djem was used as a platform

And so what he caught my attention

Let's start with the banal: firstly, it differs from my cms, it already had a template mechanism, and it was not some Smarty (which I had very unpleasant impressions from past projects), but my own djemscript language, which surprisingly turned out to be very convenient . Secondly, a visual editor of modules, somewhat reminiscent of Visual Studio or Delphi with their components. I practically screamed, having learned that the modifications that I occasionally had to do individually for a client were made in a couple of clicks, instead of long rewriting the code, writing all the procedures for the operation of the new field with the database and so on. But the advantages did not end there, recently I paid great attention to the speed of page generation and, as in previous cases, djem already had a decent answer to my question - it is initially a generator of static files, this also solves many security problems. And for sweets, the developers laid out a built-in version control system for documents.

And what's so special about it?

• Djem is not a cms or framework in the usual sense, it is rather a constructor consisting of a server in Perl and a cross-platform client in C ++
• It does not have the usual notion of “module”, everything consists of documents having the type (structure \ content pattern) and presentation (design pattern)
• Convenience of copying materials or settings from one site to another. We are all already sitting tight on Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V and there’s no need to relearn
• Convenience of importing / exporting data (glory XML)
• Perfect for CRM

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Dry. Advantages and disadvantages.

- Price. Now it is much lower than at the time of our first acquaintance, but even 9 600rub. for the minimal version, this is the lion's share of the budget if we talk about simple sample sites.

- Documentation, community. The documentation is on the official site, but in my experience it could not help in solving a number of problems. The community is absent as such, which is a pity ...

+ Save time. Development has really become faster and more fun due to the visualization of many processes.

+ Support. Here it is so operational and constructive that it even partly overshadows the minus the lack of a community. One feels a sincere desire to help, but not banal formal replies. (using the occasion a special thank you to Mikhail Korotaev)

+ Test period / development period. By the way, I had the opportunity to get a license for up to 3 months, and pay after the development of the project and payment by the customer.

A couple of screenshots

Afterword

Now I am developing two projects on it in parallel, one unfinished with very interesting unique functionality, the second is a more down-to-date financial information portal, I hope about these projects we will be able to write more details as soon as we are ready. For me, this product has really become a panacea, and I hope that I could interest you and perhaps someone after reading will find an excellent tool for web development.

Anticipating the comments, I want to clarify that I did not receive a cent from the developers for this post =) And the purpose of writing was a brief excursion into this product, and I hope in the long run to still find like-minded people among the habrovchan and form in the community in order to provide mutual assistance to a friend during development.