Uploading documents for download

Hi,

Working with uploads is easier than you probably think they are at this point.

Here’s the basic process, modified from some of the recipes in my CMSB Cookbook http://www.thecmsbcookbook.com

First, in the admin > section editor area of your CMSB interface, click on “create new menu” to create a multi-record editor called PDF to store the information about your pdf files.

You’ll need at least three fields in this editor.

A “title” text field for the link
A “content” text box for the description
And an “upload” field for the actual pdf file

For now it will be easier to use the existing "title" and "content" fields that were created by default. Just click "modify" to change the field type for “content” to a text box field and re-save it.

You’ll need to create a new field for the actual PDF upload and call that field PDF. You’ll want to change some of the values in the input validation area.

For now, delete all the file extensions allowed and type in "pdf" (lower case, no double quotes and no period before the extension) if you want to allow other types of documents, just add these extensions to the list, separated by commas.

Change the maximum uploads to 1
Change the maximum upload size to a more reasonable number, say 1000Kbytes
Uncheck the "resize" and "create thumbnail" boxes
Remove the words "title" and "caption" from the" info1" and "info2" fields and click "save" and then on "save details".

Then in the menu, click on the PDF editor you just created and then on “create” to create your first record and upload a test PDF (or other type of document).

Fill out the information for the title and content fields.
Save the record and create a second test record and save it as well.

Now go to the Admin > code generator, choose the PDF as the section and list page as the viewer type.

Leave everything else as it is and click on show code.

Copy the code before the "head" tag to your dummy html page, replacing everything before the "head" tag. and change the extension of the page to .php as in “dummy.php”

In the body, where you want to show the list of PDF files, insert the following code:
<?php foreach ($pdfRecords as $record): ?>
<?php foreach ($record['pdf'] as $upload): ?>
<a href="<?php echo $upload['urlPath'] ?>"> <?php echo $record['title'] ?></a><br />
<?php echo $record['content'] ?><br />
<?php endforeach ?>
<?php endforeach ?>

That should get you started.

You can style the page the same way that you would any html page using CSS.

After you get the hang of this, you can also change the image from the PDF image to other types of images using "IF statements".

Good luck.

Best,

Jerry Kornbluth