A CMS as a front end to build an applications GUI

Question

We need a Web-based front end for our C++ application. It's relatively simply (15 screens, simple requirements, database-centric) and should be customizable. We would like to have a workflow component... that's more complicated. Originally I thought the quickest way would be a simple PHP/Apache application, but then somebody suggested the Plone/Zope platform.

One big advantage of this approach ("this" being a CMS with underlying framework) would be expandability (it's easy to create new web pages), excellent rights management, workflow and the Zope applications server platform, which may or may not be useful to us in the future. Negative is that you're basically using a CMS for something it wasn't intended to do: be a Applications GUI. It's unclear to me how much work this would be and if we can even effectively use the workflow for our workflow.

Perhaps a "basic" framework (ex. django, cakePHP) would be more appropriate? ...but then all web pages need to be created from scratch.

I hope this isn't to general a question - but any words of wisdom would be greatly appreciated. BTW: How relavent is the Plone/Zope and Python language these days?

Answer 1

You should stick to the language your team knows best. If it's C++, you'll be suprised to know that there are C++ Web frameworks available, such as Wt. A full blown CMS like Plone is overkill for such a simple use case (basically a web frontend to the database).

Answer 2

Django was originally extracted out of a CMS, making it particularly useful for building CMS and CMS-like applications.

You should check out many open source applications that implement CMS and CMS-like features.

Answer 3

You should have a look at Django-CMS. It's incredibly easy to hook application logic to any page. I use it as the base for all of my web apps.