In this exercise, we took a database of employees and created a simple CRUD web application in the ZEND PHP framework. It was interesting because we'd previously built a similar PHP application for the same database, but without a framework.

I'll always remember this assignment because it precipitated my first question on StackOverflow. The ZEND framework removes a lot of the drudgery associated with building forms and replaces it with the frustration of trying and failing to customize the form components to your needs.

There is a lot of boilerplate and housekeeping with ZEND - although I was able to deliver an assignment I was happy with, I don't have any desire to use ZEND (or PHP!) again. Still, learning to use anything new eats time before it saves time.

For this project, we were required to use PHP to build a working Content Management System from scratch. It was an ambitious project, and planning and time management was critical.

There was a lot of labor involved, because making a back-end pageset to perform CRUD on an entity was almost an assignment in itself, and there were several entity types to manage, including pages, users, articles, and templates.

I built the site manually in MVC, which helped me shore up my MVC conceptions, but the controller was difficult to manage because all of the different types of requests had to pass through it. I don’t think I will try manually implementing MVC again because managing paths and scopes was a nightmare.

The following semester, I got myself learning Django, and the experience of working with MVC in PHP helped me to recognize the model, view, and controller equivalents in Django. I built a poll application following the tutorials (which, though complex, were a breath of fresh air compared to the introductory guestbook tutorial for ZEND), and I didn’t have to write a single line of SQL. You could also extend a basic Django project to become a CMS if you set up the right models and views (or install django CMS).

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