I am currently working on a content management system to be used by future clients sites. The project is currently in its infancy, and whilst thinking through some of the workings I have come across an issue.
I want the CMS to be very easy to use and edit site content, and add new content with minimal technical knowledge for the end user. What I am struggling with is creating a page designer for the admin backend. It will essentially allow the admin of the site to add new content, whether it be image, text, a twitter feed or some custom HTML. My aim is for it to be similar to the content editor used by Concrete5. I have done research and tried to figure out how they do it, but it has alluded me. Unlike Concrete5 I am hoping mine will just display simple blocks in the editor, rather than editing the full site. The blocks will then be stored in a database individually and then output when the page is requested.
I have experimented with the jQuery UI, using draggable elements and constraining them to a set layout, which seems okay but it is not ideal.
I am flexible to changing the way of doing this and very open to any suggestions you can give.
Sounds like you want the admin-users to be able to add some sort of widgets to the site. I would take a look at how for instance Kentico CMS is solving this: http://www.kentico.com/Product/All-Features/Content-Management/Widgets. You may download a free demo from http://www.kentico.com/Download-Demo/Trial-Version.
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I am running a wordpress website, and i am going to create a "Meet The Team" page.
We have our own custom built system internally which has users and their positions in the company already in the database so i will be using this information.
I am unsure whether to make a wordpress plugin to display this data or just simply create a page template to display it.
Does anyone have any ideas what would be best or does it really not matter?
Since the team is probably not that likely to change often I would say go with a Page Template. The main benefit being that in the future you might want to teak it a bit (sort members in a particular fashion, have different sized avatars, etc) and doing these changes would be much easier if its just a page template. If your team changes often and there is a lot of dynamic data you pretty much have to go with the plugin though
I am to develop a Joomla 3.1 Template. The template should consist of a static header and footer, as well as multiple pages, all of which need their own styling. Further, the client would like to be able to add 'events' to a specific listings page. Customers should be able to book said events via a simple form.
Thanks to some really basic guides, I have the header and footer down, as well as some simple template options. However, I am now running into some problems;
How would I approach the content section? Ideally, a page would consist of multiple, editable sections. The client would be able to edit said sections in the backend without having to deal with or accidentally changing the layout or styling of the page itself. Since there are multiple pages, I obviously need different views/containers for each of them. Is this possible and if so, how?
Another problem is the documentation, which I found to be very lacking. Even google only got me so far (basic structure, index.php, templateDetails.xml and so forth). Are there any other resources I may have missed or do I really need to refer to other templates (most of which, obviously, aren't free) and use var_dump all the time?
Writing this, I just realized that I could theoretically build a template for every single page but ... that surely can't be right, right?
If someone could provide a basic outline or at least tell me how you personally would tackle a project like this, it'd be very much appreciated.
All the best
Edit;
I just found some video tutorials but since my bandwidth is limited, I cannot watch them. Please take this into account when writing an answer. Thanks.
I have only one word for you :
GANTRY :D
gantry-framework.org
Joomla revolves around menu items that point to components. For each menu item, you can assign modules to different positions within the template to create a unique page. You only need one template if you really understand how Joomla templating works.
Joomla has very good documentation here - http://docs.joomla.org/
Few things to remember -
Component - this is a type of content or app of sorts. A component will define what content is and how it is displayed. This can be anything from blog articles and categories to an event registration system to a message board or social network. Menu items generally will point to a view in a component.
Modules - these are used to display additional content around the component output. This can be a menu, or a login box, or a weather widget or anything else you can come up with. Modules can be assigned to or excluded from the various menu items on your site.
Plugin - plugins are used to change the final output on a site. They can be used to insert Youtube videos, or forms within content, or even to alter the meta tags on a page.
Understanding how extensions work is an important first step. Once you get how those work, learning how templates and template overrides work will give you most of what you need to know to build a basic Joomla site.
I just recently started working with a Magento site, and so far I'm really not liking it. I need to remove a couple links from the main navigation, but I can't seem to find the option for it. I've googled it numerous times, and all I see are examples for coding the navigation. My question is, can you edit the site navigation like you can with say wordpress? Seeing how it's a cms I'd imagine the user should be able to make changes to the navigation using some type of interface, and without having to pull the files from the server and edit them.
Also just out of curiosity, for anyone experienced with Magento would you say it's a good choice for a cms? I've heard of it before, but haven't seen many sites that use it.
No!, so you have three options here.
Learn how to extend the navigation with the 100's of tutorials out there, it is really not that hard, assuming you have a theme you just have to edit app/design/frontend/[theme]/default/template/page/html/topmenu.phtml
Get an extension to do it for you.
Hire a developer to do it for you, we create a static block with installer for the html which make it slightly more user friendly to update in the future.
Stackoverflow is a bad place to ask questions like this, it is aimed at programmers and doing such a procedure is rudimentary stuff, I really hope you are a client trying to be cheap rather than someone who claims they can run this site.
Edit: The cms features are ok but you need to be able to code to set them all up so the end user can make the changes with WYSIWYG.
If you don't want to code for navigation then you can do below things
1) Create category and then Display Settings=>Display Mode=>static block only and Display Settings=>CMS Block=>static block name. In static block u can include in page url or custom page
2)You need to hire developer
If you're using Magento and have an integrated WordPress blog, it's possible to design a completely custom menu in the WordPress Admin using the menu builder. You have complete control over what menu items you want and the hierarchy of each item.
To get this to work, you need to integrate your WordPress blog using WordPress Integration in full integration mode. Your Magento template also has to be using the default Topmenu block.
I want to, create blog page in my website.
There are bunch of huge blogging platforms such as: Wordpress, Blogger ... But the problem is, they are offering a loads of unneeded functions. Of course, I can create simple blog. But it will cost a lots of time and I don't want to reinvent the wheel.
So what I need is, "core" functions of blogging system such as:
Adding, removing, editing posts, inserting attachments, images o posts
Pagination
I don't want to integrate wordpress because of reasons that I explained above.
Any suggestions?
I used cutewnews for a while when I was new to coding (http://cutephp.com) it's pretty much the same as a blogging system. Create posts, edit posts, archive posts, categories, template is very customizable, allow/block comments, require users to register in order to add comments, block IPs, WYSIWYG editor, etc. It's all done in the back end and then you add a few lines of code in your page and the posts will appear. You can also designate how many you want to display per page. It's simple but effective and free. I believe there is a link at the bottom of the script going back to http://cutephp.com/ but you should be able to find it and delete it. It takes about 2 minutes to install and get set up. You don't even need mysql. Will work with any php frame work or coding style as long as you have the ability to create your own blank page where you can plop the code.
I have a custom made website and right now each time I want to put some news on the front page of my site I have to edit the HTML and then re-upload via ftp.
I'm trying to find a simple feature/program that will allow me to post news to my site without manually having to edit the html and possibly allowing it to have comments.
I've tried wordpress but that seems to have too many features. For example it makes me pick a template, which I don't need because I have a custom website. And it has categories, archives, etc. I don't need all of that.
Any suggestions?
wordpress is quite lightweight imo, but if you think it's too big, you might want to use one of these: http://web.appstorm.net/roundups/self-publishing/10-ultra-lightweight-cmses-for-simple-projects/
Develope your own. Shouldn't take more than a couple of hours.