Backend and Frontend
Basically, spunQ is divided into two parts: The backend and the frontend.
The backend is the place where you can easily create and manage all content, set user permissions and administrate the whole system. Also, various search methods are included to quickly find the content objects you are looking for.
The frontend is what the visitors of your website or application will see. Various types of websites and applications are possible: simple websites, online shops, portals, intranet solutions and many more. The frontend code will therefore have to be adapted to fit your system.
However, we provide a comprehensive collection of useful methods to access and manipulate the data structures created in the backend. This way, development of applications with spunQ is extremely fast and flexible.
Once the frontend has been created, editorial users of your website will be able to change data in the backend and immediately see the results of their modifications in the frontend.
It is however possible to use original backend functions within the frontend. You might for example want to build a community platform where content created by users in the frontend will immediately be written in the database. In this case, remember to not just save the pure metadata but only to create spunQ objects out of the given data for all frontend methods to be still applicable (such frontend methods are built in ready to use).
On the other hand, there might be software projects (e.g. user management tools) where it will be better to use the existing backend as the application's main interface. In this case, the code and templates of the backend will just have to be extended – then, a typical frontend part is not needed any more. If you are interested in skinning the backend: This can be done by simply edit the backend/common/spunq.css style sheet file. As we annotated above the presentation layer in the backend is also created with the flexible Smarty template engine.
Related Subjects
>> File Structure - Backend>> File Structure - Frontend
>> Navigation in the Backend
>> General Information about the Frontend