Core Concepts

CMS Builder splits a content-managed site into two halves: the CMS Admin, where you define what content exists and CMS users enter it, and your website, where PHP pages (viewers) pull that content out of the database and display it inside your own HTML. A few core concepts cover most of what you need to know.

Sections

A section is one kind of content: News, Products, Staff, an About Us page. Each section is stored as its own MySQL table, and the CMS generates an editing interface for it automatically (its editor). The two terms are two sides of the same thing, and the CMS Admin uses both: Add New Editor creates a section together with its editor, and the menu types below are labeled Single and Multi Record Editor. You create and configure sections in CMS Setup > Database Editor.

When creating a section you choose a menu type:

• Multi Record — many records, for content like news, FAQs, jobs, or events.
• Single Record — exactly one record, for single-page content like About Us or Contact Us.
• Presets — pre-configured sections with fields already set up for common use cases; you can also copy an existing section.
• Advanced — a Category Menu (records organized in a tree, for site menus and navigation), plus Menu Group and Text Link types that organize the admin menu itself rather than storing content.

See Database Editor for the full interface.

Fields

Each section has a set of fields: the columns of its table and the inputs in its editing form. You add and configure them per section in the Field Editor. Basic field types include text field, text box, WYSIWYG, date/time, list, checkbox, and upload, plus separators and tab groups for laying out the form; advanced types cover things like hidden inputs, generated columns, and foreign keys.

Records

Records are the actual content: rows in a section’s table, entered by CMS users through the section’s editor. A News section might hold fifty records or more; a Single Record section holds exactly one.

Viewers

Viewers are how content reaches your website. A viewer is a regular PHP file that lives in your site (not inside the CMS), loads records with getRecords(), and displays field values inside your own HTML:

<?php
  list($newsRecords, $newsMetaData) = getRecords([
    'tableName' => 'news',
    'limit'     => '5',
  ]);
?>
<?php foreach ($newsRecords as $record): ?>
  <h2><?php echo $record['title'] ?></h2>
<?php endforeach; ?>

(When created with the Code Generator, viewers start with a short library-loader block that makes getRecords() available.)

CMS Setup > Code Generator produces starter code for list pages, detail pages, and other viewer types, ready to restyle to match your site design. See What Are Viewers? for details.

The workflow

1. Define a section in the Database Editor
2. Add and configure its fields
3. Enter records through the generated editor
4. Generate viewer code with the Code Generator
5. Integrate the viewer into your site’s HTML design

From here, the Quickstart walks through this flow end to end, and the In-Depth Guide covers each step in more detail.