Dootch » Technical

Calendar template and css for CGCalendar

Luke — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 04:21:30 +0000

Someone asked me for the calendar template that we used for Sun Country on the Murray so I thought I would post it here.

Download the CGCalendar template here

CGCalendar is a calendar module for CMSMS.

To get it to work, copy the contents of “Calendar Display Template.txt” into the “Calendar Templates” template. And add a stylesheet with the contents of “Calendar CSS.txt”, and attach it to your template.

How to setup a template in CMSMS

Luke — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 10:25:19 +0000

A quick checklist on how to convert a static site to a CMS Made Simple powered site:

Install CMSMS (instructions here)
Add in the template and enter all the tags
Add in the stylesheets
Link the stylesheet to the template
Add the pages
Create the menu template
Done!

“This category is empty” message in CMSMS Products module

Luke — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 01:46:06 +0000

I have a site where I’m using the products module. The company I’m doing it for runs specials every now and then, and wants them to show up as a page on the site. So what I did was create a category “specials”, and when a product is in that, it shows up on the products page.

However, as far as I know, there’s no default functionality to give a “This category is empty” message if there are no products in a category. And also, if a category is empty, the products module doesn’t render the template, so you can’t put some logic in there to display a “this category is empty” message.

So with a little bit of Smarty, this is how it’s done.

{capture assign="is_empty"}{Products category="Specials" summarytemplate="specials"}{/capture} {if $is_empty != ''}{Products category="Specials" summarytemplate="specials"}{else}There are no specials on right now.{/if}

TinyMCE config for when non-technical people will be using it

Luke — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 09:33:14 +0000

So I’m working on a project where people that are completely computer illiterate will be using a WYSIWYG box. I didn’t want them pasting from word and it keeping all the messy html from word. I found this config to work very well.

tinyMCE.init({ mode : "textareas", theme : "advanced", plugins : "paste", editor_selector : "mceEditor", forced_root_block : false, force_br_newlines : true, force_p_newlines : false, theme_advanced_buttons1 : "bold,italic,underline,separator,bullist,numlist,separator,link,unlink,separator,code,pastetext", theme_advanced_buttons2 : false, theme_advanced_buttons3 : false, apply_source_formatting : false, paste_auto_cleanup_on_paste : true, paste_remove_styles : true, paste_remove_spans : true, paste_text_sticky : true,


			setup : function(ed)

	        {    ed.onInit.add(function(ed)

	            {    ed.pasteAsPlainText = true;

	                ed.controlManager.setActive("pastetext", true);

	            });

	           }

});

More info about the paste as plain text stuff.

Serving a different image for each page in CMSMS

Luke — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 01:41:09 +0000

In one of the sites I’m working on, there is a large featured image that is different for each product page, but is the same for the rest of the pages on the site.

Heres how I did it.

1. In each page where you need a different featured image, go to the options tab, and set the Image variable

2. This variables is accessible in the menu manager as $node->image. To use them in a template, you can use the tag {page_image}. However, I needed to be able to check if there was an image because if there is no image set, I wanted to be able to have a default image. Since {page_image} is a tag and not a variable, you can’t just do isset(page_image). Instead, you first need to assign it’s output to an image.

You can do that like this:

{capture name="is_page" assign='is_page_image'}{page_image}{/capture}

3. Now that we have a variable, we can check if the page we’re on has an image, and then display the image. If it doesn’t, we can display our default image.

{if ($is_page_image ne '')} {else} {/if}

4. Done! Now on each page, the page image is displayed, and if there isn’t one, a default image is displayed.

Best modules for CMSMS

Luke — Sat, 01 May 2010 05:08:43 +0000

One of the problems of CMSMS is that there are a hell of a lot of modules, but it’s hard to know which ones are the best without trying them out first. Here are my recommendations on the best modules.

Photo Gallery – Gallery Album

Product catalog – Products – Great module. One of the great things about it is it has hierarchy (vertical) and category (horizontal) navigation. For anything where I need vertical and horizontal navigation I’ll use this module and change over the titles in the language file. Recently I’ve done just that for a links directory.

Directory – Company Directory – This has only horizontal navigation

Forms – FormBuilder

E-commerce – Products, Cart, Orders. I wouldn’t really recommend using CMSMS for any decent size ecommerce operation, but if you need some ecommerce features, these modules are the best. There’s a tutorial on setting up CMSMS to do ecommerce by Calguy here.

Blog – CGBlog

Calendar – CGCalendar

Importing feeds – CMSSimplePie

Comments/ratings – CGFeedback

Users - FrontEndUsers (Allows for front end users), SelfRegistration (Allows users to register on your site), CustomContent (allows you to change content based on whether a user is logged in or other user properties)

Post your own favourites in the comments

Creating ‘Back to top’ links in CMSMS

Luke — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 22:49:38 +0000

If you don’t use CMSMS, skip this post.

In html, if you want to do a back to top link, you can just do Back to top, and it will take you to the top of the page no problems. Pretty simple.

But in CMSMS, if you do that, for one reason or another you’re taken back to the home page. Luckily, there’s a very simple solution.

At the top of your page, put as you normally would.

For your back to top link, use:

{anchor anchor='top' text='Top' class='whatever'}

That correctly keeps you on the same page.

There’s more info on the {anchor} tag by going to Extensions -> Tags in your CMSMS installation.

SEO Friendly titles for modules in CMSMS

Luke — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 23:56:33 +0000

Quick note about this post – if you don’t use CMSMS, skip it =)

CMSMS is pretty good for SEO, but one of the things that does bug me is that by default, it doesn’t set titles for pages generated by modules.

For example, on a news page, you want the title of the page to be the name of the news post instead of ‘News’. Here’s how to do just that.

I’ve used the news module as an example, but it works with any module.

1. Disable ‘process_whole_template’

In config.php, change this line:

$config['process_whole_template'] = true;

to

$config['process_whole_template'] = false;

Also make sure that you don’t have the {process_pagedata} tag in your template.

The process_whole_template setting makes the template be processed before processing any of the calls it makes. We want to turn it off because otherwise we have no way of getting the title from the News module .

2. Assign the title variable

Go to Content → News
Click on “Detail Template” tab
Edit your template (in most cases the default is named ‘Sample’, do it for every news detail template you have)

In the top of your template put this code:

{assign var='pagetitle' value=$entry->title}

This assigns the title of the news post to a variable we can use later

3. Update your site template to use the new variable

Open up your site template, and in the first line put:

{content assign="capturedcontent"}

Then replace your {content} tag with {$capturedcontent}.

Now we just need to actually use the title we’ve got set in the pagetitle variable.

The title of your page will look something like this:

{title} | {sitename}

Change it to :

{if isset($pagetitle)}{$pagetitle} | {sitename}{else}{title} | {sitename}{/if}

The line checks to see if pagetitle is set, and if it is, we set the title to be {$pagetitle} instead of {title}

All done!