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2014-05-27, 20:42:06
Hello! I just (as of yesterday) switched to GetSimple CMS and I'm in the middle of converting a project that I started in Drupal (getting grey hair over it). So far, this feels just right. GetSimple seems like a wonderful CMS for its purpose and my gut feeling is that in the future I'm better off with using GetSimple and extending it when necessary than trying to adjust a bigger CMS to the needs of small and medium company websites. I have to say, not being forced to deal with MySQL issues alone feels like an immense relief.
The following is partly a question about 'best practice', so I'm going to detail a little bit what I need before I head to my more technical question.
My websites for small companies could typically have a structure like this:
![[Image: structurex.svg.bin]](http://k007.kiwi6.com/hotlink/g4cld3v6qc/structurex.svg.bin)
So, I have a dozen or so “articles”, advertising this or that product, service or quality of the company. These belong to specific categories and the frontpage links to them primarily via category menus (in the drawing “Menu A” and “Menu B”). For instance, if the company sells fruits and vegetables, “Menu A” could be “Fruit” and link to articles like “Our Apples”, “The Best Peaches Ever” etc. and “Menu B” could be “Vegetables” and link to articles like “Stay Healthy with Tomatoes” or “Onions are Awesome”.
Some articles are more important than others. So the more important ones are featured. They have a teaser and a teaser image that occur both on the frontpage and below each article. In many ways like blog articles, except that the content is more “static” than a blog and there’s no need for author or date information.
Since users will get confused and break things unless the UI is restricted and precisely tailored to its purpose, the user interface should be like this:
If I want to add a new article, I create a special page, select from a dropdown list the correct category (which automatically makes the article show up in the corresponding menu). If this articles requires a teaser on the frontpage and elsewhere, I click a corresponding checkbox and write the teaser text.
***
Now to my technical question:
It seems that I can achieve what I need with the help of the I18N Special Pages plugin. I have just begun to look into it, so far I seem to have two issues:
a) Less important: With the plugin I have to define special pages within GetSimple CMS’s GUI, rather than in files. It’s not a really important issue, since with a flat file database I can have this under version control, I suppose. But after struggling with Drupal’s “Views” module, I have come to dread with horror the idea of mixing structure (the model) and data in the same logical location. So, this bugs me conceptually and I’d like to know whether there’s another way to do it in a configuration file or in PHP that is invisible from the admin interface. Also, I think it’s better to hide this from the interface for end users.
b) Much more pressing: To create both the list of teasers on the frontpage (with appropriate markup) and the secondary menus, I need a function that returns/filters all special pages with a specific tag (e. g. "vegetables" and "promote-to-frontpage"). Could anybody provide me with a code example?
Or is there a better way to achieve what I need? Also, please forgive me, if I have overlooked something in the documentation.
The following is partly a question about 'best practice', so I'm going to detail a little bit what I need before I head to my more technical question.
My websites for small companies could typically have a structure like this:
So, I have a dozen or so “articles”, advertising this or that product, service or quality of the company. These belong to specific categories and the frontpage links to them primarily via category menus (in the drawing “Menu A” and “Menu B”). For instance, if the company sells fruits and vegetables, “Menu A” could be “Fruit” and link to articles like “Our Apples”, “The Best Peaches Ever” etc. and “Menu B” could be “Vegetables” and link to articles like “Stay Healthy with Tomatoes” or “Onions are Awesome”.
Some articles are more important than others. So the more important ones are featured. They have a teaser and a teaser image that occur both on the frontpage and below each article. In many ways like blog articles, except that the content is more “static” than a blog and there’s no need for author or date information.
Since users will get confused and break things unless the UI is restricted and precisely tailored to its purpose, the user interface should be like this:
If I want to add a new article, I create a special page, select from a dropdown list the correct category (which automatically makes the article show up in the corresponding menu). If this articles requires a teaser on the frontpage and elsewhere, I click a corresponding checkbox and write the teaser text.
***
Now to my technical question:
It seems that I can achieve what I need with the help of the I18N Special Pages plugin. I have just begun to look into it, so far I seem to have two issues:
a) Less important: With the plugin I have to define special pages within GetSimple CMS’s GUI, rather than in files. It’s not a really important issue, since with a flat file database I can have this under version control, I suppose. But after struggling with Drupal’s “Views” module, I have come to dread with horror the idea of mixing structure (the model) and data in the same logical location. So, this bugs me conceptually and I’d like to know whether there’s another way to do it in a configuration file or in PHP that is invisible from the admin interface. Also, I think it’s better to hide this from the interface for end users.
b) Much more pressing: To create both the list of teasers on the frontpage (with appropriate markup) and the secondary menus, I need a function that returns/filters all special pages with a specific tag (e. g. "vegetables" and "promote-to-frontpage"). Could anybody provide me with a code example?
Or is there a better way to achieve what I need? Also, please forgive me, if I have overlooked something in the documentation.
