Web app: Data management for non-programmers

Question

I've been working in an office and we've had some data to work with a couple of times. By that I mean hundreds of rows with sometimes very large chunks of text in each row. Say recipes for our customers, where you'd have ID, name, category, recipe itself, time, ...

The thing is that we need to work with this data and edit it quite often and I can't figure out what's the best solution. What we've been doing so far was leaving it in an SQLite database and writing a simple PHP webapp that would list the data and creating a long editing form where you'd pass the data and save it back in the database. The presentation (think Access Reports) was simple, just dumping the data, cover it in some HTML, some Texy! (Markdown alternative) etc.

My question is if there's some either PHP or Python tool that would simplify this process when we get some other data to manage, so that we don't have to develop a new app. Something that would create a list/table of the data (well, simple with the core languages) and create an editing environment (table, forms, JavaScript validation, ...) for average joes to work with.

It's gonna be an intranet application, so nothing overly fancy is needed. The main condition is ease of use.

The closest I got was with Adminer Editor, but not being a HC programmer myself, I didn't know very well how to bend it for our needs.

Answer 1

You mention that you want a web application and Python, so I think you should take a look at web2py.

If you click on the link to web2py then you will get a lot of information - probably too much!

To cut to the chase: If you install web2py, point it to your SQLITE database with a couple lines of python code, then you have an instant database admin web application

The result will not be beautiful, and ease of use is perhaps arguable, but the resulting web app does everything you need. If you find that you are working with a particular database a lot, and so would like to improve the app, you can slowly add more python code to improve the look and feel and make the application more specific to the database you are using.

Django is another web application framework using python, with a very similar feature set. IMHO it is harder to learn how to create fast and simple web apps with Django, which is why I recommend web2py.

Answer 2

There is probably nothing automated that will suit all of your needs, but perhaps some can get close.

Here are a few tools/frameworks that may help:

Lightweight:
- http://www.phpscaffold.com/ - generates CRUD pages based on SQL export (repo)

Heavyweight:
- symfony has an admin generator which can be found here.
- CakePHP offers scaffolding