Is Get Simple really all its cracked up to be?

[judgedredd]

I have been trying to get GS working for a very specific purpose on a site I have been working on.

The site in question is already a live site and is here: http://theforensicnurse.org .

A screenshot of the front page is attached.

Near the end of the front page (also the index page) is a 'sidebar' where 'Recent Posts/Popular Posts' are shown. At the moment this is static and not working. This section is where I want live 'Recent Post' to appear.  This is why I installed GS. To get this area working. I have installed these plugins in the hope of getting this area to work: GS Blog plugin, News Manager (Updated) plugin, the I18N, I18N Special Pages and I18N Search plugins. Yet apart from PHPcode that gets the sidebar code working (which I have not implemented yet) there is NOTHING to be able to insert a post into an already constructed news-template page (news-template.php). I was expecting something like: 

PHP Code:

<?php nm_insertpost(); ?>

Or something similar, but there is nothing like that. There doesn't seem to be ANYTHING that I can use that will do what I require. Its bloody frustrating. Or am I missing something?

I have spent many weeks trying to get something going with no luck whatsoever.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

I do NOT want to use the built-in template, but construct my own template (which I have already done) to follow the theme of the site. How can I get that template to pickup the full blog posts?

By the way, having an attachment limit is a bit ridiculous. I have had to delete all the attachments I used in my other posts.

[shawn_a]

nah it sucks

[shawn_a]

Where do you expect these "posts" to come from?, cause both news manager and i18n do this..

[judgedredd]

Where do you expect these "posts" to come from?, cause both news manager and i18n do this..

These will be written in the back end by 'creating a new post'. I have to find some way of then plugging in the list of posts in the sidebar without having to use any GS templates. Then on clicking one of the sidebar post excerpts it takes you to the full post or expands the post to fill the sidebar completely.

I may have found a solution external to GS. I found a news script from phpjabbers.com that seems to do exactly what I want, apart from putting the post in its own page. It just expands the post in the sidebar. Which seems to be enough actually.

ALL the GS plugins (and GS itself) suffer from:

1) lack of clear instructions with examples
2) lack of developement or participation by the plug in developers in forum questions
3) takes forever to get any questions answered (Carlos never answered a question I had about his plug in and I posted that question over a month ago)
4) lack of forum participation (getting 2-3 people to respond in all the posts I have put up is not exactly inspiring confidence in using the GS system)

[Felix]

.... not exactly inspiring confidence in using the GS system ....

Hi judgedredd,
GS does not have a drupal or wordpress community. However, because GS is so flexible and api php friendly,
you can apply code, libraries and scripts for any case or solution you can find on the internet.
The only price for so much freedom is to know some api, php and javascript. In the mean time, keep it up
and we try to answer questions as often as we can.