90% Crud

LogiCreate

The guys over at Tap have been talking about their LogiCreate framework for a while, and they open sourced it (QT-style license) back in June.

I avoided learning more about it, politely paying attention to information about it but never following through. I've been burned by frameworks in the past, being overly complex and obtuse. LogiCreate has glowing reviews, but who wouldn't post glowing reviews? They say it will slash your development time and separate code from content, which we've all heard before.

The difference is that this time it's true. I downloaded LogiCreate yesterday having only seen a basic overview, and by the end of the day I had a basic multi-user application up and running. It's really easy to develop modules for, and I think it's the bee's knees. If you're developing a web app that needs to manage users, permissions and databases check it out, I'm sold. I'll be posting more info about the app that I'm developing later, but in the meantime spend some time reading up on it.

The only downside at this point is that there isn't a really strong module development community. It comes with a lot of what you'll need, but it's not on par with something like PostNuke in terms of add-ons. I think this will change as more people hear about it and start using it, but that can be a chicken/egg problem. Tap offers some high quality commercial modules for things like mailing lists, forums, and ecommerce starting around $200. Also, it isn't XHTML/CSS compliant, but you can fix that in the templates if you're so inclined. The speed of development certainly makes up for these shortcomings.