Reuse of CGEcommerceBase address dataManage the address information of your webshop at the CGEcommerceBase modules Admin page and use it all over the website!
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.Next-page button for the Gbook moduleShow guestbook replies from the Gbook module for CMSMS with "endless scrolling" instead of a paginated view.Smarty Templating BasicsIn this tutorial you get an oversight of the most useful Smarty templating codes, including practical examples.Additional Front End Users module featuresA few extra's that help you using the Front End Users module in CMS Made Simple™.Front End Users one field login formTo 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.Base CMS Made Simple page template with automated metatagsHow 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...Easy way to use Font Awesome in CMS Made SimpleIn 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!CGBlog Admin article list usability improvementsAs 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.The power of Template Inheritance and the CMSMS Design ManagerTemplate Inheritance is an approach to managing Smarty templates in CMS Made Simple™ that resembles object-oriented programming techniques.Adding previous and next links to the modules detail pagesThis 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 examplesCMSMS 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...Additional anti-spam feature in Gbook moduleThe 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 switcherTo 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.Breadcrumbs for the Products moduleThere 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 shortcutsThe 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.Create a progress bar with Smarty and CSSIf 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 blockIn CMS Made Simple you can pass your own parameter to a global content block.Smartphone call me linkA 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 SmartyCreate your own XML or RSS-feed reader with plain Smarty, there are no external modules or plug-ins needed!Easy way to combine and minify JavaScript files and codeLoading 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 formbuilderIn 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 stylesheetsStrip 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 resultsAs 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 errorsSometimes 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 stylesheetThe 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 moduleAt 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 viewIn 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 tipsWhile 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 editorSometimes 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 tabsOne 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 imagesI 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 SimpleAt 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 jQueryTabbed 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 anchorWith jQuery you can easily create nice smooth page scrolls to different content blocks.Call a Smarty tag from a UDTFor 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 moduleI 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 filesTo 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 pageA 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 moduleIn 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 contentWith 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.Marking protected pages in your navigationWhen 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.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 SimpleIn this article I will try to give a description of my second approach to create a multilingual website with basic CMSMS functions.Count itemsSmall User Defined Tag that count items in an array, useful for several modules like News, CGBlog, Products, etc.List of imagesAn 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 contentsGenerate 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 frontendYou 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 modifierSorting the output of an array with this simple Smarty modifier.Styling formsStyling a website form isn't that hard. A stylesheet example making your life much easier.