Wedgefish is an Open Source Web Application Framework with an integrated Content Management System: it is a fully-featured platform to create and manage any type of website, from blogs to e-commerce shops or institutional sites, through a single tool, shortening user's learning curve and allowing reusing existing knowledges effectively, reducing development time and making it easy to modify existing projects. Its name comes from one particular specie of fish living in the waters of Equatorial Africa and in other warm seas, belonging to the family of races, absolutely harmless to humans, which is threatened by fishing that it is made for commercial purposes.
The Wedgefish platform was not written from an academic point of view: we are conscious of the kind of obstacles which people coming from different life and working experiences could encounter while attempting to learn and master a web content management tool.
The actual concept of "computing made easy for everyone" is actually far away from being achieved in the facts, but this doesn't usually only depends from user's lack of will when learning how to use a new software. Nowadays, most web frameworks are packaged to offer a range of ready-made features, which are accessible through a few clicks of the mouse, while in practice when user tries to dig a little under the surface to adapt the product to his needs, a deep gap arises between a minority of "specialists" with a specific knowledge of the product and the rest of users, completely unaware of what is happening behind the surface. As a consequence, users which are not willing to give up on their expectations start depending on expensive external consultants for all of their customization needs.
Rather than offering a sparkling mantle of prepackaged features, on stunny default models and graphics, making it difficult to implement anything else, Wedgefish goes on a different way, filling a gap in the web development platforms arena: providing the common user, having a basic knowledge of PHP and HTML, willing to learn a few programming paradigms, a development environment that does not require user adapting to itself, but sees things the same natural way.
To achieve this, Wedgefish gives up imposing some unnecessary formalisms (although allowing more experienced users applying them, if required by the size of the project) only introducing a limited number of easily understandable fundamental concepts, otherwise following consolidated, valid and recognized standards, to allow user immediately starting developing his projects in an autonomous way, reusing as much as possible his existing knowledges.
Wedgefish tries to solve the most common problems user may encounter in the development of web applications, putting him in the ideal conditions to concentrate on the most important and visible aspects of his work.
It was conceived with the goal to simplify development of safe, portable and easily expandable applications, while its architecture makes possible adding new features almost real-time, with minimal changes to already developed code. For this reasons, it is the ideal choice for developing web applications whose characteristics may not, for a series of circumstances, be completely defined from the beginning, and therefore need to grow over time.