• Hello Fabrik Community

    Fabrik is now in the hands of the development team that brought you Fabrik for Joomla 4. We have recently transitioned the Fabrik site over to a new server and are busy trying to clean it up. We have upgraded the site to Joomla 4 and are running the latest version of Fabrik 4. We have also upgraded the Xenforo forum software to the latest version. Many of the widgets you might have been used to on the forum are no longer operational, many abandoned by the developers. We hope to bring back some of the important ones as we have time.

    Exciting times to be sure.

    The Fabrik 4.0 Official release is now available. In addition, the Fabrik codebase is now available in a public repository. See the notices about these in the announcements section

    We wish to shout out a very big Thank You to all of you who have made donations. They have really helped. But we can always use more...wink..wink..

    Also a big Thank You to those of you who have been assisting others in the forum. This takes a very big burden off of us as we work on bugs, the website and the future of Fabrik.

Fabrik or Seblod -

timomer

Member
Hello all,

First I want to say that I love Fabrik, its logic and most of all its community :rolleyes:

I have a new project where I need a site that allows users to create their own articles - these articles will be completed by the user entering data into a pre formatted form.

I have spent the last year on and off investigating the best CCK for the job and the results of this has left me looking at Fabrik or Seblod.

A lot of comments have recommend Seblod due to its integration with the joomla article system and the ablity to position fields on the provided templates.*

My exspireance with Fabrik has mostly been around building queries and displaying data in a table.

Seblod so far appears to be best for my needs, but I really do not want to move away from Fabrik and most importantly I don't want to invest a significant amount of time in one tool to find out its not the best for the job.

So I ask the community... has anyone else had such a project and can any one give me examples of when they have chosen Fabrik over Seblod or Seblod over Fabrik.

Thank you all in advance!
tim


*im not saying Fabrik cannot do this, its just very easy in Seblod
 
Why not use both? :)

Sorry that's not really an answer.

I actually downloaded Seblod last week, I do from time to time see what K2, Flexicontent and Seblod do.

I think it really comes down to what you need out of a product and how complex it's going to be.

Fabrik is the only one that caters for table joins and the facility of injecting JS and PHP as far as I know.

Apart from creating articles what else do you need?
 
Thanks felixkat, that is a very good point! (if maybe scares me a little!?)

So the features of the site as it is in my head would be...

  • Multiple ways to display and search for articles (easy)
  • Users can submit their own articles using a form, this will be text, images, lists
    • Seblod can store these as articles
    • I guess Fabrik will store these in their own table. Is this good? By doing this is there downside?
  • Able to display these articles
    • Seblod has a very flexible template called One that has multiple module positions
    • Not sure how to do this with Fabrik as the only output I have seen \ created is table based list of rows
  • Comunitly support (Community Builder)
To be honest, that's about it really - sounds very easy when I write it down ;D


I think the area that scares me the most with using Fabrik is how will I display these articles and the position of the fields?
 
Since Fabrik can connect to any table in the database, you can have the form saving directly in the #__content table. The only challenge is how you handle the #__assets table.
It can be done, but it is tricky.
But maybe you can use a fabrik table and work on the templates to display the articles the way you need.
 
Thanks jfquestiaux!

This is where I see the problem, Fabrik is a great technical tool that can (if tricky) produce what I want.
Seblod already intergartes with joomla articles, already has a flexable way to display articles - so am I making my life unnecessarily difficult by using Fabrik?

Guys, this is very helpful, thank you for your feedback and more is welcome!
-tim
 
Well it's true to say that Seblod is more designed for what you are doing. It is focused more specifically on creating articles which is what you want your users to do.

Fabrik has more elements, a better system of lookups by using dbjoins, the ability to joins tables together and intergrating with other components.

I have only had limited time playing around with Seblod. I like all the smooth Ajax interfaces but I would have to use it more solidly before I could judge it.

I think really if you want quick and simple and specfically catered for articles go for Seblod.

If you want the most powerful product available to Joomla with an endless supply of new features but possibly a slightly longer learning curve, go with Fabrik. ;)

Or you could become superior above us all and use both and post back the results... heh heh.

If I were in your position I would build a couple of sandboxes, allocate youself a bit of time, decide on something you want to setup and then try achieve that on Seblod and Fabrik and see which you prefer.

I believe Fabrik will have a better templating system at some point but unfortuently the whole Joomla 2.5 thing has meant that focus was put on a 2.5 compatable version of Fabrik, i.e Fabrik 3.x.
 
Thanks felixkat, I think your suggestion of a mix of both makes sense - unfortunately this will not make me superior but will report back when I can :)

This has been very helpful for me so many thanks to both of you for your comments.

If anyone else has any comments / feedback please do share.

many thanks
 
Hey, sorry for my late reply, currently in the middle of backpacking!

Sorry to say, I don't have a lot to add. Soon after this post I dropped the project due to lack of time. But I did get a basic Fabrik prototype working by not using the article table and setting up my own table to store the required elements. Since then I have had multiple small projects and always used Fabrik. But, none of these used articles.

Hopefully I will have the time for this project again soon, when i do i think Fabrik will be best as tying my self to the joomla article object may end up being a little limiting.

Do share your own tests!
 
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