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I’ve begun working with a video website content management system called PHPMotion. It’s considered to be a YouTube clone, is 100% template-based,  is “easily” skinnable via HTML and CSS and is FREE.

So how does PHPMotion stack up as a free CMS/Web Application?

PHPMotion Demo Site

PHPMotion CMS consists of the PHP application code and the HTML/CSS template tied together with the TinyButStrong (TBS) template engine. It uses MySQL for the database.

Requirements:

• Linux/Unix server
• PHP 4.3 and above (including support of CLI)
• MySQL database server
• LAME MP3 Encoder
• Libogg + Libvorbis
• Mencoder and also Mplayer
• FFMpeg-PHP
• GD Library 2 or higher
• CGI-BIN
• Be able to run background processes

PHPMotion manages videos (many formats – mpg, avi, divx and more), photos/images, mp3 audio, blogs, groups, favorites, member profiles, messaging, friends networking and a commenting system. The admin system allows you to manage all of this plus ads that can be placed in the site and stats on the media and members.

In my opinion …

The product is very fully featured and the admin is very well done.

TinyButStrong is pretty interesting. My experience with it so far is limited to the poking around inside the template code and a cursory glance at a bit of the PHP app code. It is designed to allow dynamic creation of HTML pages by inserting output of PHP code into HTML templates using special tags. This makes the templating side pretty straight-forward.

TBS is also meant to simplify the PHP code through a concise, yet powerful, set of properties and methods defined within the TinyButStrong class file. TBS claims to be efficient and easy to use based on it consisting of one PHP class made up of 6 methods and 5 properties. I don’t have any experience to speak to the reality of this claim yet. But I should before long and will report on it further.

My initial research and investigation indicates that creating custom themes may be somewhat more complicated than the (scant) PHPMotion documentation indicates. And the only company or group doing custom themes for this CMS appears to be PHPMotionTemplates.com . Do you think these two companies might be connected?

The templates are heavily abstracted for the purpose of flexibility in modularization. It’s very effective but can also be initially confusing when customizing from an existing template. It didn’t take too long to catch on to the pattern of things though and this seems to get easier with a bit of effort.

PHPMotion doesn’t appear to provide documentation that clearly defines and lays out the components or modules of the system and doesn’t provide a summary list of the TinyButStrong tags that can be used in the template based on the PHP that drives the application. These things would be very nice to have when looking at building a completely custom theme. Apparently, PHPMotion expects the developer to extract all this information from the codebase itself. Gee, thanks.

Like many “free” and open-source projects, PHPMotion relies heavily on a wiki and a forum for reference. It’s a nice idea but, in practice, it really sucks because the majority of what you’re likely to find consists of questions from other lost souls trying find the same info that you need. Occasionally there is a nugget of info that answers a question but, more often, it’s not much help. Personally, I think this is a very lazy approach to “documentation” that assumes the userbase will figure it out and post it or it assumes that the project is so self-explanitory that it doesn’t require documentation. That’s slow and unreliable at best. At worst, it’s a complete hinderance.

With that said …

PHPMotion appears to be a really capable and flexible video-site system. In consideration of the expensive commercial alternatives available, the product is sort of a miracle.

If you need a hot-rod, out-of-the-box, FREE solution for your community-based-video-web-site needs, give PHPMotion a try! It’s a whole lot of bang for the buck, to be sure. And there are several hosting partnters available to provide you with CHEAP hosting as well.

I’ll be working much more with this product over the next several weeks and will have a much more insightful opinion to follow up with. Some of the things I hope to have more information on include scalability, options for redundancy configurations/failover configurations, options and capabilties of ffmeg and mencoder for encoding/transcoding video, multiple bandwidth options on the video player and just how easy it is to get rolling with TinyButStrong.

Tags: admin system, avi divx, background processes, cms web, content management system, cursory glance, database requirements, dynamic creation, free cms, lame mp3, member profiles, mencoder, mp3 encoder, mysql database server, photos images, php application, php gd, template code, template engine, video website

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 6th, 2009 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Fun and Recreation, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.