Migrating Company Directory module to LISE This tutorial will give some assistance porting your Company Directory content to the LISE module, an otherwise time consuming job. 
Tips, tricks and tutorials to make it even easier to work with CMS Made Simple. CMSMS is an open source Content Management System. It provides website developers with a simple, easy to use utility to allow building websites. Moving CMS Made Simple module content to LISE A series of tutorials that will give some assistance porting your third party module content to the LISE module, an otherwise time consuming job. FormBuilder WatchGuard Having trouble with the FormBuilder module for CMS Made Simple and need some help troubleshooting? This small User Defined Tag will help you. The LISE module The LISE (short for List It Special Edition) module by JoMorg allows you to create lists that you can display throughout your website. A versatile module that you really have to try and see its many options! Redirect all incoming URL's to the correct canonical URL There are multiple URL's to open a page at your website, this might have a bad influence at your SEO status and Analytics results. Very simple solution to protect some content with a password In this tutorial Velden will show you a way to implement a poor man's solution to protect some content with a password. It will display a simple form to enter a password and press a submit button to get access to protect content. Embed YouTube video via a cookieless domain Since the EU Cookie Law and the new General Data Protection Regulation law the use of (tracking) cookies is controversial. You need a cookie consent feature when embedding YouTube videos at your website to comply with these laws... Loading static content from a cookieless subdomain Minimize your HTTP requests generating your CMS Made Simple-powered website by loading static content from a cookieless subdomain. Add maintenance information to the frontend for the content editor Guide the content editor to correct place in the Admin area to update text. Automatically send a featured article to social media Select a random CGBlog article and post it once a day to the social media using IFTTT. Reuse of CGEcommerceBase address data Manage the address information of your webshop at the CGEcommerceBase modules Admin page and use it all over the website! Search Form Autocomplete Website visitors can quickly find and select from a pre-populated list of values as they type, leveraging searching and filtering. Create a webshop in CMS Made Simple Create a basic webshop using Products, Cart2 and Formbuilder modules. This method will provide a fully functional webshop, but without payment handling and order management. If you do need these, this tutorial will still be a good starting point for building your webshop in CMSMS. Next-page button for the Gbook module Show guestbook replies from the Gbook module for CMSMS with "endless scrolling" instead of a paginated view. How to use SitemapMgr SitemapMgr creates page and module sitemap, robots.txt and humans.txt files. Ready to use sitemaps for several modules like News, CGBlog and Products are included! Redirect (re)moved pages in CMS Made Simple Moved pages, news or blog articles at your site, but don't want visitors to get an error 404 page. Redirect them to the current spot at your site. Share data between websites: the cache_remote_file tag This plugin tag reads content from the source website and caches it for a adjustable time. When that time has elapsed, it checks if the source content is available. If so... How to install CMSMS 2.x with the Installation Assistant CMS Made Simple 2.0 and above is shipped with a useful PHAR Installation Assistant. This tutorial video will show you how to use it to install your CMSMS website! Setting up Pretty URL in CMS Made Simple By default CMS Made Simple creates a "technical" URL. It is functional, but it lacks aesthetic value. Pretty, or Search Engine Friendly URL is a... CMS Made Simple Admin password recovery Oops, you forgot your CMS Made Simple™ Admin credentials... Now what? This video tutorial shows you how to reset them. Setting up SSL in CMS Made Simple Let's Encrypt SSL provides free SSL certificates, when your host provides popular control panels like cPanel or Plesk the installation for CMS Made Simple™ is very easy. How to use CGCalendar The CGCalendar module handles (recurring) events. The module has an extended template control and is easy to work with. Smarty Templating Basics In this tutorial you get an oversight of the most useful Smarty templating codes, including practical examples. Breadcrumbs for the CGBlog and News module At www.welovecmsms.com I wanted a breadcrumbs trail as a navigational aid for the visitors. Additional Front End Users module features A few extra's that help you using the Front End Users module in CMS Made Simple™. Front End Users one field login form To enter a protected area at your website using the FEU module you need a login name and password. Sometimes it is more convenient to have just one field. Setting up Front End Users module A guide helping you to set up the Front End Users module in CMS Made Simple™ to easily protect the content of your pages. Use module template output in multiple content blocks How to use generated module content at different spots in your page lay-out. Gotta love Smarty. Base CMS Made Simple page template with automated metatags How to build a CMSMS page template and show the news/blog title as the page title, get the correct canonical value for module detail pages, pass a correct image to social media websites, etc... Using non-jQuery AJAX form submission in CMSMS A way to submit a form AJAX-style in CMS Made Simple™. A guestblog from the Dutch forum member Guido. Use a UDT for content styling Using PHP-code for styling a content page or blog article is probably not the first thing that comes in mind. But because of the easy way to name and call the UDT, and the flexibility of its content it is very useful!! Easy way to use Font Awesome in CMS Made Simple In WYSIWYG editors Font Awesome code can be difficult to add, and when have multiple icons in templates it might be a bit confusing... Solution: a simple UDT! Admin (failed) login notification You want to have more control over your Admin panel? Who is entering it and when are people failing to login... SimplePieMgr template In this article I will show you tag examples, you can use building your own SimplePieMgr RSS reader template. Hide your email address on CMSMS web pages A prefilter file that will automaticly hide an email address at your CMS Made Simple™ site from email harvesting bots that scrap webpages, looking for email addresses. Solution within CMSMS for the target="_blank" vulnerability Opening a bad link at your site using target="_blank" can give the target website partial access to the browser tab your website is in. CGBlog Admin article list usability improvements As a frequent user of the CGBlog module, I sometimes miss the overview of planned blog articles. Using the core module_custom feature you can simply adapt Admin templates to your likings. Server Time Difference Having problems with start and end time settings in a module? A news article is published, but isn't visible at the frontend of the website... You could have problems with the time settings at your website and/or server. Convert a string to availability images A simple and easy to use availability feature for CMS Made Simple™. A User Defined Tag (UDT) converts a comma seperated string of 0's and 1's into a list of images. Moving posts from Guestbook to the Gbook module The popular Guestbook module for CMS Made Simple™ sadly hasn't had any development lately... But lucky for us, there is an alternative: the well maintained Gbook module. Simple Site Info and Mgr These modules provide a way to monitor the maintenance status of your CMS Made Simple websites. The power of Template Inheritance and the CMSMS Design Manager Template Inheritance is an approach to managing Smarty templates in CMS Made Simple™ that resembles object-oriented programming techniques. Getting the image dimensions in Smarty Using the height and width of the images and thumbnails in your Gallery templates should be pretty straightforward, not? Well I guess it wasn't... Until now! Force www on all your domains, or not... A generic piece of code you can drop in all of your root .htaccess files to force "www.", or do the opposite and remove the "www." in the URL no matter what the domain name is. Adding previous and next links to the modules detail pages This tutorial demonstrates the power and simplicity of Smarty template code by using it to add previous and next buttons to the CMS Made Simple News module without any UDT. Smarty scope examples CMSMS 1.12 introduces the concept of 'scopes' in Smarty templates. This version of Smarty does not treat each and every variable as a global. This will solve problems with... Add a cookie consent feature to CMS Made Simple When you have advertisements or certain social media code at your website, you might need a cookie consent bar at your website to comply with the EU Cookie Law. In this tutorial I will show you how easy it is to add one to your CMSMS website. Simple list A User Defined Tag (UDT) in CMS Made Simple™ to convert a plain text content block value into an array of lines. CMSMS modules and 'endless scrolling' 'Endless scrolling', 'lazy loading', 'endless pages', 'infinite scrolling', is a feature that only downloads extra content when you reach the end of the current content. Perhaps the most famous example is Facebook. You can scroll down your 'wall' and it will (probably) never end. How to make a sub folder site appear as the root website How to have a website in a sub folder but let it appear as the main domain. To have a more organized root folder at my web server I have my personal website installed in a sub folder. Now I have a better overview over all sub websites. Printer-friendly pages without a module There is really no need for a module to create printer-friendly pages at your CMS Made Simple™ website. In this tutorial I will show you how you can do this! Additional anti-spam feature in Gbook module The Gbook guestbook module for CMS Made Simple™ has a built-in anti-spam feature. It uses the b8 statistical (Bayesian) spam filter. At one of my websites where I use the GBook module I noticed spammers are getting more clever trying to by-pass the filter and it leaves me more work checking ham or spam... I found a really simple method to hide and show the form. When there is no form, a bot can't fill it in... Website style switcher To make a website accessible for visitors with visual impairments I needed a style switcher to change the output of the template. Not only for text and background colors, but also for (layout) images. Customizing Admin theme without hacking files If you want to make small changes to the default CMSMS Admin theme, you can change the core stylesheet files with the risk of overwriting it when upgrading the CMS. But creating a custom Admin theme might be a bit of an overkill for a few changes... CMS Made Simple™ has a - not very well-known - feature for doing this without any risk! Breadcrumbs for the Products module There isn't one method for adding a breadcrumb trail to the Products module for CMS Made Simple™. Climbing down the 'hierarchy ladder' to the product, you pass three templates and each template has its own method. Group Company Directory items in alphabetical order and add shortcuts The Company Directory module is good to show an overview of companies and contacts at your CMS Made Simple™ website. With a little adjustment to the summary template you can group the output in alphabetical order and add shortcuts to the entries. UDT that outputs the current season At our community website I made a header with a changing photo of our village and the surrounding area. I made four folders with photos, one for each season. With a User Defined Tag I read the date and determine what season it is and set it in a Smarty string. With that I change the output of the photo gallery path. Create a progress bar with Smarty and CSS If you want show your visitors i.e. the received money vs. the goal for a charity collection or show the still available tickets to a concert, it is nice to show a progress bar. You can do this with a few lines of Smarty and a bit of CSS. Pass a parameter to a global content block In CMS Made Simple you can pass your own parameter to a global content block. content_type UDT for use in CMSMS 1.12.x and 2.x In several of my tips and tricks articles I use the content_type UDT to change the content type of the page. In the 2.x release of CMS Made Simple this method is changed and won't work anymore... Smartphone call me link A small User Defined Tag that can be used to create clickable call-me links of telephone numbers when the website is opened in a mobile web browser. After clicking the link it first opens a pop-up box asking for confirmation, to prevent accidental phone calls. A XML or RSS-feed reader with plain Smarty Create your own XML or RSS-feed reader with plain Smarty, there are no external modules or plug-ins needed! Risk is probability times impact "The calculation of risk is probability times impact". This is not just a random quote (to me...) It is the basis of risk management that I used a lot in my daily job as a maintenance engineer. Now I still use it when I develop my websites, in example for... Easy way to combine and minify JavaScript files and code Loading separate JavaScript files delays the rendering of a web page. Having a large CMS Made Simple website with multiple JS files, it can have a serious effect on your total page load time. Combine the files into one JS file - just like the {cms_stylesheet} tag does for stylesheets - is a solution for this. I was looking for a simple method to achieve this, but... Honeypot anti-spam feature for formbuilder In this tutorial I will show you how Velden a honeypot anti-spam feature added to a Form Builder form in CMS Made Simple. Using strip tags in templates and stylesheets Strip white space in templates and stylesheets can improve your website in different ways. But what are the best spots to put the strip tags? I always forget it, so will post some examples here to help myself, uhh you :) Highlight moderator name in CGFeedback results As the owner or moderator of a CMS Made Simple website using the CGFeedback module, you often reply to questions asked by visitors. But how to let the visitors see *you* are answering and not another person with your name...? Mousetrap for template errors Sometimes difficult problems have simple solutions. I noticed in the adminlog of one of my CMS Made Simple™ websites some template errors have occurred, but I didn't know where exactly... Well, just browse the pages and search for the broken page you would say. But this is easier said than done, it is a huge website with let alone over 2000 blog articles. No way I could solve it this way. I created a... FormBuilder template and stylesheet The default form template and stylesheet provided by the excellent FormBuilder module for CMS Made Simple™ is straightforward. Just the very basics are there. In this post I try to give a more extended styled form template. I hope it will give you a headstart styling the forms at your CMSMS website. Direct link to searchresults Products module At my no salt diet website I use the Products module for a Nutrient Database. When you want to know the nutritional values of in example an apple, you type "apple" in the searchbox, hit the submit button and you will get a list of all items containing the word "apple". So far, so good. But what I missed is a direct link to the search resultspage in case people ask me questions about some product. I created a work around to achieve this. Formbuilder form in a FancyBox modal view In this guestblog CMSMS forummember Velden will show you how he implemented an Ajax based 'call-me-back' Form Builder form, that pops up in a FancyBox modal view. Website maintenance tips While helping people at the CMS Made Simple forum I have seen a lot of websites and different working methods. I also notice pitfalls and see people having problems that I think could have been prevented... Flexible HTML code block in your blogs WYSIWYG editor Sometimes you need to add HTML-code to a blog article, i.e. an iFrame or some code to include a third party (YouTube) movie. Using a WYSIWYG editor this isn't possible, you need to put the code in a Global Content Block and copy the GCB-tag in the text-editor. Having a small website this works fine, but for large websites it is a different story. The down side is you get lots of GCB's associated with different articles, the admin doesn't get clearer of it... Multiple pages in one with jQuery tabs One page showing several other pages without reloading the page. The CGSimpleSmarty module for CMS Made Simple™ will help you! Create your own slider for news articles or images I will describe the basics of how to create a slider, you can use it yourself in your CMS Made Simple module templates. Think of rotating summary views of the News or CGBlog modules or rotating company logos in the CMSMS Banners module. Building an image library in CMS Made Simple At my Pneumatic Tube website I show lots of photos. In order to meet all ownership laws (at least try to) I must find a way to document the source information of the photos at my website. Just a photo album module isn't enough... I needed an Image Library at my website! But there isn't an out-of-the-box CMSMS module for that... I had to think something out myself! And if I say so myself, I have succeeded! :o) I will briefly describe what I used and did. Tabbed content using jQuery Tabbed content is a great way to have much content on a page (which might be SEO-friendly). I used it for a multilingual solution at my website. I will show you how easy it is to add them to a CMSMS template. Smooth page scroll to an anchor With jQuery you can easily create nice smooth page scrolls to different content blocks. Call a Smarty tag from a UDT For my pneumatic tube website I used the Products module for CMS Made Simple as an image library. The module was great for this purpose, I can add images and can store additional information in custom fields. But for adding a single image to a page I needed a large module tag with parameters. If at some point I want to change something here I need to change all tags in the pages... I searched and found a method to make this easier for me... Create a RSS feed without a module I will show you an example RSS feed in combination with the CGBlog module for CMS Made Simple. You can also use it for several other modules, like News, CGCalendar, etc. You need to change the Smarty tags in the feed template matching with the module used. Create dynamic sitemap, humans.txt and robots.txt files To help search engines like Bing and Google index your website you can use sitemaps and a robots.txt file. A module like SiteMapMadeSimple is a great solution to create your static sitemap. A disadvantage of the module is that after each content change the sitemap file is recreated. For very large websites it can take a while... I had that problem at one of my own websites. A few hunderd pages, a few thousand... Assign a different header image per page A recurring question at the CMS Made Simple forum is how to show a different header image for each website page. In this article I will show some examples how this can be done. Add tags to the CGBlog or News module In this tutorial I will show you a simple method (using Smarty) to add a tagging feature to the CGBlog, News and other modules in CMS Made Simple. Change website lay-out depending on page content With this sample template you have three content blocks, the frontend of the website will change depending on the presence of content in these blocks. There is no need for multiple templates. Set, read and debug cookies A cookie, also known as an HTTP cookie, web cookie, or browser cookie, is usually a small piece of data sent from a website and stored in a user's web browser while a user is browsing a website. You can use cookies to store user settings for i.e. website styling, language preferences, etc. I will show you how to set, read and debug cookies at your CMS Made Simple website. Marking protected pages in your navigation When using Calguy1000's FrontEndUsers module in CMS Made Simple you can easily protect the content of your pages and hide the buttons in the navigation for visitors who are not logged in. But when you are logged in, you can't see the difference in the menu between regular and protected page buttons. With a small addition to the menu template you can add that feature. Send Email Notification on Page Change This is a User Defined Tag / Event combination that sends an email when a page is changed. Show a list of the recently updated pages Outputs a list of recently updated pages. This code is forked from the CMS Made Simple {recently_updated} plugin. At the existing CMSMS plugin it isn't possible to change the lay-out of the output. I needed it for my website though, so I created this UDT which gave me more flexibility. Admin Login Info Mailer A simple mailing script based on the existing CMSMS mailer module, to send the newly added admin user's login info to his/her e-mail. GeSHi - Generic Syntax Highlighter Add the Generic Syntax Highlighter (GeSHi) to the frontend of your website. Count days, is this page recent? With this User Defined Tag you can calculate the age of a content page and use it in your page/template to show a notice or style some text. Multilingual template for CMS Made Simple In this article I will try to give a description of my second approach to create a multilingual website with basic CMSMS functions. Hide forms for certain IP addresses Hide website forms for certain IP addresses (partial banning) Make a link to a file User Defined Tag to create a link to open a file, followed by the filesize. Get a page's root parent's hierarchy-position This User Defined Tag gets the hierarchy-position of a pages very top parent. Get a page's root parent's alias This User Defined Tag gets the alias of a pages very top parent. Count items Small User Defined Tag that count items in an array, useful for several modules like News, CGBlog, Products, etc. List of images An example UDT which reads the images in a folder and shows it in a unordered list. With JQuery, Fancybox and some styling you can use it to create a simple photogalery. Table of contents Generate a table of contents for your pages based on the heading tags. It requires, depending on how you want to use it, IDs or anchors in your page. Add a class to all page(groups) You can use this small tag to get yourself a class name for the current page. This is very useful when you want to apply particular CSS style only to a certain page, or a subset of pages. Test templates without breaking the frontend You need to do some tests at your website. But you don't want to break the frontend for your visitors. A simple solution using Smarty. Sort array modifier Sorting the output of an array with this simple Smarty modifier. Styling forms Styling a website form isn't that hard. A stylesheet example making your life much easier.
Tips, tricks and tutorials to make it even easier to work with CMS Made Simple. CMSMS is an open source Content Management System. It provides website developers with a simple, easy to use utility to allow building websites. Moving CMS Made Simple module content to LISE A series of tutorials that will give some assistance porting your third party module content to the LISE module, an otherwise time consuming job. FormBuilder WatchGuard Having trouble with the FormBuilder module for CMS Made Simple and need some help troubleshooting? This small User Defined Tag will help you. The LISE module The LISE (short for List It Special Edition) module by JoMorg allows you to create lists that you can display throughout your website. A versatile module that you really have to try and see its many options! Redirect all incoming URL's to the correct canonical URL There are multiple URL's to open a page at your website, this might have a bad influence at your SEO status and Analytics results. Very simple solution to protect some content with a password In this tutorial Velden will show you a way to implement a poor man's solution to protect some content with a password. It will display a simple form to enter a password and press a submit button to get access to protect content. Embed YouTube video via a cookieless domain Since the EU Cookie Law and the new General Data Protection Regulation law the use of (tracking) cookies is controversial. You need a cookie consent feature when embedding YouTube videos at your website to comply with these laws... Loading static content from a cookieless subdomain Minimize your HTTP requests generating your CMS Made Simple-powered website by loading static content from a cookieless subdomain. Add maintenance information to the frontend for the content editor Guide the content editor to correct place in the Admin area to update text. Automatically send a featured article to social media Select a random CGBlog article and post it once a day to the social media using IFTTT. Reuse of CGEcommerceBase address data Manage the address information of your webshop at the CGEcommerceBase modules Admin page and use it all over the website! Search Form Autocomplete Website visitors can quickly find and select from a pre-populated list of values as they type, leveraging searching and filtering. Create a webshop in CMS Made Simple Create a basic webshop using Products, Cart2 and Formbuilder modules. This method will provide a fully functional webshop, but without payment handling and order management. If you do need these, this tutorial will still be a good starting point for building your webshop in CMSMS. Next-page button for the Gbook module Show guestbook replies from the Gbook module for CMSMS with "endless scrolling" instead of a paginated view. How to use SitemapMgr SitemapMgr creates page and module sitemap, robots.txt and humans.txt files. Ready to use sitemaps for several modules like News, CGBlog and Products are included! Redirect (re)moved pages in CMS Made Simple Moved pages, news or blog articles at your site, but don't want visitors to get an error 404 page. Redirect them to the current spot at your site. Share data between websites: the cache_remote_file tag This plugin tag reads content from the source website and caches it for a adjustable time. When that time has elapsed, it checks if the source content is available. If so... How to install CMSMS 2.x with the Installation Assistant CMS Made Simple 2.0 and above is shipped with a useful PHAR Installation Assistant. This tutorial video will show you how to use it to install your CMSMS website! Setting up Pretty URL in CMS Made Simple By default CMS Made Simple creates a "technical" URL. It is functional, but it lacks aesthetic value. Pretty, or Search Engine Friendly URL is a... CMS Made Simple Admin password recovery Oops, you forgot your CMS Made Simple™ Admin credentials... Now what? This video tutorial shows you how to reset them. Setting up SSL in CMS Made Simple Let's Encrypt SSL provides free SSL certificates, when your host provides popular control panels like cPanel or Plesk the installation for CMS Made Simple™ is very easy. How to use CGCalendar The CGCalendar module handles (recurring) events. The module has an extended template control and is easy to work with. Smarty Templating Basics In this tutorial you get an oversight of the most useful Smarty templating codes, including practical examples. Breadcrumbs for the CGBlog and News module At www.welovecmsms.com I wanted a breadcrumbs trail as a navigational aid for the visitors. Additional Front End Users module features A few extra's that help you using the Front End Users module in CMS Made Simple™. Front End Users one field login form To enter a protected area at your website using the FEU module you need a login name and password. Sometimes it is more convenient to have just one field. Setting up Front End Users module A guide helping you to set up the Front End Users module in CMS Made Simple™ to easily protect the content of your pages. Use module template output in multiple content blocks How to use generated module content at different spots in your page lay-out. Gotta love Smarty. Base CMS Made Simple page template with automated metatags How to build a CMSMS page template and show the news/blog title as the page title, get the correct canonical value for module detail pages, pass a correct image to social media websites, etc... Using non-jQuery AJAX form submission in CMSMS A way to submit a form AJAX-style in CMS Made Simple™. A guestblog from the Dutch forum member Guido. Use a UDT for content styling Using PHP-code for styling a content page or blog article is probably not the first thing that comes in mind. But because of the easy way to name and call the UDT, and the flexibility of its content it is very useful!! Easy way to use Font Awesome in CMS Made Simple In WYSIWYG editors Font Awesome code can be difficult to add, and when have multiple icons in templates it might be a bit confusing... Solution: a simple UDT! Admin (failed) login notification You want to have more control over your Admin panel? Who is entering it and when are people failing to login... SimplePieMgr template In this article I will show you tag examples, you can use building your own SimplePieMgr RSS reader template. Hide your email address on CMSMS web pages A prefilter file that will automaticly hide an email address at your CMS Made Simple™ site from email harvesting bots that scrap webpages, looking for email addresses. Solution within CMSMS for the target="_blank" vulnerability Opening a bad link at your site using target="_blank" can give the target website partial access to the browser tab your website is in. CGBlog Admin article list usability improvements As a frequent user of the CGBlog module, I sometimes miss the overview of planned blog articles. Using the core module_custom feature you can simply adapt Admin templates to your likings. Server Time Difference Having problems with start and end time settings in a module? A news article is published, but isn't visible at the frontend of the website... You could have problems with the time settings at your website and/or server. Convert a string to availability images A simple and easy to use availability feature for CMS Made Simple™. A User Defined Tag (UDT) converts a comma seperated string of 0's and 1's into a list of images. Moving posts from Guestbook to the Gbook module The popular Guestbook module for CMS Made Simple™ sadly hasn't had any development lately... But lucky for us, there is an alternative: the well maintained Gbook module. Simple Site Info and Mgr These modules provide a way to monitor the maintenance status of your CMS Made Simple websites. The power of Template Inheritance and the CMSMS Design Manager Template Inheritance is an approach to managing Smarty templates in CMS Made Simple™ that resembles object-oriented programming techniques. Getting the image dimensions in Smarty Using the height and width of the images and thumbnails in your Gallery templates should be pretty straightforward, not? Well I guess it wasn't... Until now! Force www on all your domains, or not... A generic piece of code you can drop in all of your root .htaccess files to force "www.", or do the opposite and remove the "www." in the URL no matter what the domain name is. Adding previous and next links to the modules detail pages This tutorial demonstrates the power and simplicity of Smarty template code by using it to add previous and next buttons to the CMS Made Simple News module without any UDT. Smarty scope examples CMSMS 1.12 introduces the concept of 'scopes' in Smarty templates. This version of Smarty does not treat each and every variable as a global. This will solve problems with... Add a cookie consent feature to CMS Made Simple When you have advertisements or certain social media code at your website, you might need a cookie consent bar at your website to comply with the EU Cookie Law. In this tutorial I will show you how easy it is to add one to your CMSMS website. Simple list A User Defined Tag (UDT) in CMS Made Simple™ to convert a plain text content block value into an array of lines. CMSMS modules and 'endless scrolling' 'Endless scrolling', 'lazy loading', 'endless pages', 'infinite scrolling', is a feature that only downloads extra content when you reach the end of the current content. Perhaps the most famous example is Facebook. You can scroll down your 'wall' and it will (probably) never end. How to make a sub folder site appear as the root website How to have a website in a sub folder but let it appear as the main domain. To have a more organized root folder at my web server I have my personal website installed in a sub folder. Now I have a better overview over all sub websites. Printer-friendly pages without a module There is really no need for a module to create printer-friendly pages at your CMS Made Simple™ website. In this tutorial I will show you how you can do this! Additional anti-spam feature in Gbook module The Gbook guestbook module for CMS Made Simple™ has a built-in anti-spam feature. It uses the b8 statistical (Bayesian) spam filter. At one of my websites where I use the GBook module I noticed spammers are getting more clever trying to by-pass the filter and it leaves me more work checking ham or spam... I found a really simple method to hide and show the form. When there is no form, a bot can't fill it in... Website style switcher To make a website accessible for visitors with visual impairments I needed a style switcher to change the output of the template. Not only for text and background colors, but also for (layout) images. Customizing Admin theme without hacking files If you want to make small changes to the default CMSMS Admin theme, you can change the core stylesheet files with the risk of overwriting it when upgrading the CMS. But creating a custom Admin theme might be a bit of an overkill for a few changes... CMS Made Simple™ has a - not very well-known - feature for doing this without any risk! Breadcrumbs for the Products module There isn't one method for adding a breadcrumb trail to the Products module for CMS Made Simple™. Climbing down the 'hierarchy ladder' to the product, you pass three templates and each template has its own method. Group Company Directory items in alphabetical order and add shortcuts The Company Directory module is good to show an overview of companies and contacts at your CMS Made Simple™ website. With a little adjustment to the summary template you can group the output in alphabetical order and add shortcuts to the entries. UDT that outputs the current season At our community website I made a header with a changing photo of our village and the surrounding area. I made four folders with photos, one for each season. With a User Defined Tag I read the date and determine what season it is and set it in a Smarty string. With that I change the output of the photo gallery path. Create a progress bar with Smarty and CSS If you want show your visitors i.e. the received money vs. the goal for a charity collection or show the still available tickets to a concert, it is nice to show a progress bar. You can do this with a few lines of Smarty and a bit of CSS. Pass a parameter to a global content block In CMS Made Simple you can pass your own parameter to a global content block. content_type UDT for use in CMSMS 1.12.x and 2.x In several of my tips and tricks articles I use the content_type UDT to change the content type of the page. In the 2.x release of CMS Made Simple this method is changed and won't work anymore... Smartphone call me link A small User Defined Tag that can be used to create clickable call-me links of telephone numbers when the website is opened in a mobile web browser. After clicking the link it first opens a pop-up box asking for confirmation, to prevent accidental phone calls. A XML or RSS-feed reader with plain Smarty Create your own XML or RSS-feed reader with plain Smarty, there are no external modules or plug-ins needed! Risk is probability times impact "The calculation of risk is probability times impact". This is not just a random quote (to me...) It is the basis of risk management that I used a lot in my daily job as a maintenance engineer. Now I still use it when I develop my websites, in example for... Easy way to combine and minify JavaScript files and code Loading separate JavaScript files delays the rendering of a web page. Having a large CMS Made Simple website with multiple JS files, it can have a serious effect on your total page load time. Combine the files into one JS file - just like the {cms_stylesheet} tag does for stylesheets - is a solution for this. I was looking for a simple method to achieve this, but... Honeypot anti-spam feature for formbuilder In this tutorial I will show you how Velden a honeypot anti-spam feature added to a Form Builder form in CMS Made Simple. Using strip tags in templates and stylesheets Strip white space in templates and stylesheets can improve your website in different ways. But what are the best spots to put the strip tags? I always forget it, so will post some examples here to help myself, uhh you :) Highlight moderator name in CGFeedback results As the owner or moderator of a CMS Made Simple website using the CGFeedback module, you often reply to questions asked by visitors. But how to let the visitors see *you* are answering and not another person with your name...? Mousetrap for template errors Sometimes difficult problems have simple solutions. I noticed in the adminlog of one of my CMS Made Simple™ websites some template errors have occurred, but I didn't know where exactly... Well, just browse the pages and search for the broken page you would say. But this is easier said than done, it is a huge website with let alone over 2000 blog articles. No way I could solve it this way. I created a... FormBuilder template and stylesheet The default form template and stylesheet provided by the excellent FormBuilder module for CMS Made Simple™ is straightforward. Just the very basics are there. In this post I try to give a more extended styled form template. I hope it will give you a headstart styling the forms at your CMSMS website. Direct link to searchresults Products module At my no salt diet website I use the Products module for a Nutrient Database. When you want to know the nutritional values of in example an apple, you type "apple" in the searchbox, hit the submit button and you will get a list of all items containing the word "apple". So far, so good. But what I missed is a direct link to the search resultspage in case people ask me questions about some product. I created a work around to achieve this. Formbuilder form in a FancyBox modal view In this guestblog CMSMS forummember Velden will show you how he implemented an Ajax based 'call-me-back' Form Builder form, that pops up in a FancyBox modal view. Website maintenance tips While helping people at the CMS Made Simple forum I have seen a lot of websites and different working methods. I also notice pitfalls and see people having problems that I think could have been prevented... Flexible HTML code block in your blogs WYSIWYG editor Sometimes you need to add HTML-code to a blog article, i.e. an iFrame or some code to include a third party (YouTube) movie. Using a WYSIWYG editor this isn't possible, you need to put the code in a Global Content Block and copy the GCB-tag in the text-editor. Having a small website this works fine, but for large websites it is a different story. The down side is you get lots of GCB's associated with different articles, the admin doesn't get clearer of it... Multiple pages in one with jQuery tabs One page showing several other pages without reloading the page. The CGSimpleSmarty module for CMS Made Simple™ will help you! Create your own slider for news articles or images I will describe the basics of how to create a slider, you can use it yourself in your CMS Made Simple module templates. Think of rotating summary views of the News or CGBlog modules or rotating company logos in the CMSMS Banners module. Building an image library in CMS Made Simple At my Pneumatic Tube website I show lots of photos. In order to meet all ownership laws (at least try to) I must find a way to document the source information of the photos at my website. Just a photo album module isn't enough... I needed an Image Library at my website! But there isn't an out-of-the-box CMSMS module for that... I had to think something out myself! And if I say so myself, I have succeeded! :o) I will briefly describe what I used and did. Tabbed content using jQuery Tabbed content is a great way to have much content on a page (which might be SEO-friendly). I used it for a multilingual solution at my website. I will show you how easy it is to add them to a CMSMS template. Smooth page scroll to an anchor With jQuery you can easily create nice smooth page scrolls to different content blocks. Call a Smarty tag from a UDT For my pneumatic tube website I used the Products module for CMS Made Simple as an image library. The module was great for this purpose, I can add images and can store additional information in custom fields. But for adding a single image to a page I needed a large module tag with parameters. If at some point I want to change something here I need to change all tags in the pages... I searched and found a method to make this easier for me... Create a RSS feed without a module I will show you an example RSS feed in combination with the CGBlog module for CMS Made Simple. You can also use it for several other modules, like News, CGCalendar, etc. You need to change the Smarty tags in the feed template matching with the module used. Create dynamic sitemap, humans.txt and robots.txt files To help search engines like Bing and Google index your website you can use sitemaps and a robots.txt file. A module like SiteMapMadeSimple is a great solution to create your static sitemap. A disadvantage of the module is that after each content change the sitemap file is recreated. For very large websites it can take a while... I had that problem at one of my own websites. A few hunderd pages, a few thousand... Assign a different header image per page A recurring question at the CMS Made Simple forum is how to show a different header image for each website page. In this article I will show some examples how this can be done. Add tags to the CGBlog or News module In this tutorial I will show you a simple method (using Smarty) to add a tagging feature to the CGBlog, News and other modules in CMS Made Simple. Change website lay-out depending on page content With this sample template you have three content blocks, the frontend of the website will change depending on the presence of content in these blocks. There is no need for multiple templates. Set, read and debug cookies A cookie, also known as an HTTP cookie, web cookie, or browser cookie, is usually a small piece of data sent from a website and stored in a user's web browser while a user is browsing a website. You can use cookies to store user settings for i.e. website styling, language preferences, etc. I will show you how to set, read and debug cookies at your CMS Made Simple website. Marking protected pages in your navigation When using Calguy1000's FrontEndUsers module in CMS Made Simple you can easily protect the content of your pages and hide the buttons in the navigation for visitors who are not logged in. But when you are logged in, you can't see the difference in the menu between regular and protected page buttons. With a small addition to the menu template you can add that feature. Send Email Notification on Page Change This is a User Defined Tag / Event combination that sends an email when a page is changed. Show a list of the recently updated pages Outputs a list of recently updated pages. This code is forked from the CMS Made Simple {recently_updated} plugin. At the existing CMSMS plugin it isn't possible to change the lay-out of the output. I needed it for my website though, so I created this UDT which gave me more flexibility. Admin Login Info Mailer A simple mailing script based on the existing CMSMS mailer module, to send the newly added admin user's login info to his/her e-mail. GeSHi - Generic Syntax Highlighter Add the Generic Syntax Highlighter (GeSHi) to the frontend of your website. Count days, is this page recent? With this User Defined Tag you can calculate the age of a content page and use it in your page/template to show a notice or style some text. Multilingual template for CMS Made Simple In this article I will try to give a description of my second approach to create a multilingual website with basic CMSMS functions. Hide forms for certain IP addresses Hide website forms for certain IP addresses (partial banning) Make a link to a file User Defined Tag to create a link to open a file, followed by the filesize. Get a page's root parent's hierarchy-position This User Defined Tag gets the hierarchy-position of a pages very top parent. Get a page's root parent's alias This User Defined Tag gets the alias of a pages very top parent. Count items Small User Defined Tag that count items in an array, useful for several modules like News, CGBlog, Products, etc. List of images An example UDT which reads the images in a folder and shows it in a unordered list. With JQuery, Fancybox and some styling you can use it to create a simple photogalery. Table of contents Generate a table of contents for your pages based on the heading tags. It requires, depending on how you want to use it, IDs or anchors in your page. Add a class to all page(groups) You can use this small tag to get yourself a class name for the current page. This is very useful when you want to apply particular CSS style only to a certain page, or a subset of pages. Test templates without breaking the frontend You need to do some tests at your website. But you don't want to break the frontend for your visitors. A simple solution using Smarty. Sort array modifier Sorting the output of an array with this simple Smarty modifier. Styling forms Styling a website form isn't that hard. A stylesheet example making your life much easier.