PyroStreams

Create, display, and manipulate data within PyroCMS.

There are a lot of CMSs based on CodeIgniter out there, and I have tried them all. The one that stands above the rest in my opinion is PyroCMS, and open source CMS that has really come into its own since its 1.0 release in late 2010.

For a long, long time, I have wanted one thing: an open-source CMS I can use for very small projects that has a channels-like functionality like ExpressionEngine. The channels functionality is so unbelievably key that I just can't build without it anymore. It is part of what makes ExpressionEngine a truly genius product.

As much as I love it, EE costs $150-$300 for a license and I work on some projects for friends, family, and myself where I need a lower price tag. So in November 2010 I started developing PyroStreams to give me that functionality. I have literally no intention of relasing it let alone selling it.

Once I started, I realized that I could start from scratch and try a few things that I had on a mental wishlist for EE Channels. One of them was the inability to make sense of the table structures that channels uses. This led me to the idea to use CodeIgniter's DB Forge function to be manipulating tables in the database while you were creating streams using the backend. Field types were given properties that told PyroStreams what kind of MySQL column to create. So after creating an entire stream structure in PyroCMS, you could go into your database and see a table with a corresponding structure.

Over time PyroStreams acquired new functionality: ability to create fields and then assign them to tables. Create and edit forms, a calendar display where you could display dates by a column you chose, reCAPTCHA support, and so on. Eventually I realized this could be really useful, so I released it to the PyroCMS community.

The response has been great, and it has made PyroStreams a product that I am really commiting to further developing and improving. PyroStreams 2, in fact, is right around the corner.