Best practices

7 posts by 3 authors in: Forums > CMS Builder
Last Post: April 29, 2011 (RSS)

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By ispro - April 19, 2011

In Article Manager, most content was structured into Articles (i.e. there was just one template for what we would call a section editor in CMS Builder). In CMSB, we can build something similar by using the category menu feature (still undocumented). More likely however, a website consists of Article pages plus more complex functionality in list-detail pages. Ideally, these would be both managed through a common menu structure. Are there "best practices" defined for doing this? Can AM2 and CMSB concepts be implemented together?

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By Jason - April 19, 2011

Hi,

There are many different ways your can structure your information inside CMS Builder. Ultimately, you should go with whichever one you're most comfortable with:

For example, if you're using CMS Builder to manage a list of articles on your site you could:

1) have a single article section where you put all your articles

2) have a category section where you list categories and then assign each record in your article section a different
category

3) have multiple article sections and put different types of articles in different sections.

These are just a couple of ideas. Which one is best depends greatly on exactly what you're trying to accomplish.

If you could give us a better idea of what you're doing with your site, we may be able to make some suggestions.

Hope this helps. Let us know if you have any other questions.

Also, if you're interested in learning more about category sections, here are a couple of good tutorials that should help get you started:

http://www.interactivetools.com/forum/gforum.cgi?post=64259#64259

http://www.interactivetools.com/forum/gforum.cgi?post=77230#77230

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Re: [Jason] Best practices

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By ispro - April 19, 2011

Thank you very much for your reply - I have implemented a category structure as described in one of the tutorial posts - please look at the sample in http://www.apdama.org/mt/articlesList.php The site that I am rebuilding is at http://www.mtparkinsons.org I think that much of the content can be handled by a single Articles section. However, there are quite a few examples where I want to have a custom List-Detail structure. For example, if someone were to click on Resources > Support Groups, I would want to have navigation pass to a Support Group List page that in turn would link to a Support Group Detail page. Another example is About Us> Chapter Board of Directors: I'd like navigation to pass to a page such as that at http://www.apdama.org/cmsb/boardList.php which in turn has a Detail page. Is it just a matter of changing the category code to jump to a specific file rather than an instance of the Article section?

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By Jason - April 20, 2011

Hi,

Sure, what you can do is add a field to your category section with a name like "custom_url". When you're outputting your links, you can check to see if there is a value there. If there is, you can use the value as a link, if there isn't, then you can just output the usual article section link.

Hope this helps.

Re: [Jason] Best practices

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By ispro - April 22, 2011 - edited: April 22, 2011

Yes - it did work (more or less). I'm running into other problems..i) I want to have the links menu on every page, but I see that the genrated url is dependent upon the current page I'm on. See http://www.apdama.org/mt/articlesList.php It must be something to do with the ?category phrase which I do not understand. Also ii) when a user clicks on a category in the menu I would like to be able to load a default article into the main content area, rather than just showing a link to an article. How can I do that?

Thanks

Volodymyr

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By robin - April 25, 2011

Hi Volodymyr,

Can you send in a Support Request with all the site details?
https://www.interactivetools.com/support/email_support_form.php?priority=free
(you don't need to enter an order number)

Then we can take a close look at what's going on which will make troubleshooting much easier and quicker.

Please be sure to include:
- CMS Builder login details
- FTP details
- link to this forum thread for reference - http://www.interactivetools.com/forum/gforum.cgi?post=87657
- and any other details that will help.

Note: don't post any login or FTP details in the forum.

Thanks,
Robin

Robin
Programmer
interactivetools.com

Re: [robin] Best practices

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By ispro - April 29, 2011

I think I have solved most of my issues, the following are outstanding: I) I have implemented a categories hierarchy and an Article section editor, as described in this forum. However, just like in Article Manager, I would llike to be able to assign an article to more than one category. However, I would then like to have different sort positons in different categories. For example, I have an article under the News category that I want to show under the Headlines category, but I may want a different "drag 'n drop" position in Headlines. II) URLs are usually relative to the current page - how do I create an absolute url? (See last menu item inhttp://www.apdama.org/mt/articlesList.php

Thanks.