I'm not too used to content management systems so apologies if this is trivial or not actually a CMS question...
I'd like to find a (preferably open source) website solution that can display pages of 'links', where each link has a bunch of properties (url, name, owner, picture, creation date etc) and I want the site to have fixed pages for which each page shows those links with specific sort order and filter (eg 'all links from bob in creation order') as well as a page where the user can manipulate the filter and sort order. So I guess this means a page that has a 'controller' on it that can be told its sort/filter and it renders the links (based on a given template of what a link looks like) drawing from a back-end database in which there would be perhaps 100 of these links defined.
Seems straightforward, I think my issue is I don't know the terminology for what I want. I downloaded one CMS ('fork') but couldn't see any sort of feature. And I'm sure highly sophisticated CMS solutions can do this sort of stuff, but I'd prefer something 'entry level'!
Any pointers appreciated.
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we're just completing a new site build. With the current theme, we have had issues with structured data (we've highlighted it on Webmasters tools, and weeks later had to re-highlight it, and even then the highlighting prediction is not where we would like it to be).
It seems like Google is not able to find our Title, author, categories, content, featured image, date very easily. I'd expect to be able to communicate this to Google with 100% accuracy, since its so simple and we use the same format for all our articles). So maybe our theme is missing something by way of tags or something in the code to point to and identify this data?
Is that the case? Could someone please tell me what this aspect is called (so I can research it by its term), explain what I need to do with the new build, point me in the direction of an authoritative explanation/tutorial?
The site in question is a WordPress site, but I also am working on some php sites and would like to use this information on all sites, if it can be applied this way.
Thanks
You can use micro-data to mark-up the structured data. Also Google will really like your site if you show him (with a code) everything about the site - navigation, sidebar (aside), content (article) and so on. I suggest you to read about schema.org and micro-formats.
Here is an usefull article about your problem and how to implement micro-formats to your site.
I'm going to be creating a Concrete5 website that will feature product listings. The listing system must offer all your typical ecommerce features, minus the ability to purchase items. It's strictly for browsing purposes only.
For example:
- Browse by category
- Search products
- Listings/results page with thumbnails and brief information (title, description, price in US/CAD, manufacturer, maker, etc.)
- Products single page (with detailed information, attributes and gallery/images)
All the things you'd expect to find in a listing system.
My issue is I can't find a specific add-on for something like product listings. This leaves me thinking that it may be best to use the e-commerce add on and do my best to hide anything related to the cart/payment process. That way it could just be used for everything else it offers.
What are your thoughts on this? Is there a better option?
Thanks for the advice!
Use the page list block. It has everything you need except for searching. But, in essence, that's what your requirements call for -- listing of pages.
Create a page type for your "product". The "brief information" can be in the Content block, or you can set as attributes. You'll probably want to make some minor changes to the block's view (by creating a new template) that displays the image as you want, the proper attributes, etc. Something similar to http://www.concrete5.org/documentation/how-tos/designers/styling-the-page-list-block/
There are several adanced page list blocks in the marketplace. You might want to start with those.
Right creat Page type.
After creat Page attributes.
Add a block page_list create a template for it and filter by attributes.
You can even use ajax to filter.
http://www.weblicating.com/doku/doku.php?id=cheatsheet/#.UbR7P0BmiSp
U can find here about page_list or read documentation Concrete5.
This is not a direct code question, however, I think it may be useful. After google-ing for a while, I can't find a definitive answer....
A while back, I built a rudimentary CMS for shcool. Image upload, gallery, text, a basic captcha, etc. Basically a blog that you could upload images to. My quesiton is this:
Could any of you clever ducks tell me what features a robust, solid, home-made CMS should contain? I don't want to make a super fancy pants sort of site, but I do want to flesh it out a little. My current job is in Sharepoint design, and I don't want to lose any of the PHP skills that course taught me.
Any input would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
Well.. The best product is a product that reaches the requirements of the customer.
But I would say:
Dynamic menu
Dynamic pages
Different type of pages - front page, posts, lists, media, gallery
Secure back end
Dynamic user configuration
A install script
Template editor, where you can define modules
Maybe a offline post editor, with a up-loader (Drag a .doc file in a folder, and the file is automatically added as a post on the page)
I just started learning HTML and CSS, with no knowledge on other languages such as javascript, Php, and so forth. Websites like Refdesk.com boast fresh content everyday, there has to be someway they are able to have new content everyday other then changing it by hand. Some Google searches came up with nothing but RSS feeds.
How is this done?
Thanks for the helpful answers, it answers half of my question, but does this also mean that the owner would have to manually add the webpage each day for new content, or say add in the content for a few days and have them displayed day after day automatically?
Most dynamic websites derive their page content from a database. Change the content in the database, and the content on the pages changes to follow suit.
Likely they have some form of content management system which allows non-technical users to update the site. In some systems, the content manager itself can get quite advanced. Here's a description of the latest version of the one used at the BBC, CPS, which drives the many BBC websites and more.
They most probably use a database where they store the content and the newest entries are retrieved from this database and displayed. This requires a server side language like PHP, Java, Python.
The HTML is generated dynamically.
The answers about databases combined with a server-side language like PHP are pretty good and very direct, but depending on how new you are to web development they might not be conceptual enough.
The first thing you need to understand is that a database is a collection of tables - each like any you might be familiar with in excel.
For example, one table in your database might be named "daily_links" and it might have two columns, one named "Date", and one named "Link". So every time you want to publish a new link, you just make a new row.
So now you are half way there.
Now what the server-side scripting language is able to do is to go to the database, look at your table "daily_links" and bring back each all the information that it found there.
From there it can do anything with that information like make a new anchor tag in html for each row it found, and give it an href of the data found in the column "Link".
That is rough idea in (very) general terms.
I hope that is easy to understand.
I'm just starting to evaluate joomla CMS as a tool to build out my personal site. I'd like to manage multiple sites/domains with one copy of joomla on one host. so I'll own mysite.com and myothersite.com, which will both point to the same host/joomla code. If I do this I need to be able to set which domain/site the content I add shows up on. For some sites the content will be on both for others it will be on only one. What would be ideal it to have some kind of filtering mechanism so I don't have to manually set where the content goes.
What would be ideal is for me to set tags on the content and each site can specify which taged content to show.
My last requirement is that I be able to have different pages on each site.
Is this possible or am I asking too much from a "free" CMS?
Thanks all
I don't know if there's a component that achieves what you're describing here. I use a multi-language component in some of my sites that shows translations, but it doesn't "suppress" articles that doesn't have references to a translation: it just says "No translations to this article". I know you're not asking for translations methods, but I think the Joomfish way of selecting content based in a chosen language would be what you wanted, but not based in languages, just domains.
The only component I know it would be able to suppress articles based in pre defined parameters (in its case the language), is the Joomfish's "Table Localization Plugin", but you need to be a Joomfish silver member paying $60 to Joomfish's developers.
You could write a component(see here for plugin documentation), that analyzing the domain, would suppress articles that shouldn't appear in that specific domain. But I think it's going yo be a lot of work. You would learn a lot of Joomla's architecture, though.
How Joomla displays its content (output) is controlled entirely by parameters. So if you can control what parameters are loading, you can create multiple displays per host
However, that may be overkill in this case. You can just easily hack your template. Just make it load a different menu for siteA and siteB. (The host is set in $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'])
The menu on siteA could have a tagging component item, set to display articles tagged siteA.com. The siteB will have the same for its domain.
While there are extensions that will do what you describe (http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/core-enhancements/multiple-sites), Joomla is really designed for one site at a time. I've done setups where I use the same codebase for Joomla and manage it with version control, but I always end up launching multiple sites with individual databases.
However, I don't know of any CMS that inherently allows you to share articles across instances while keeping the data centralized. You may be looking at an extension (or your own customization) regardless of which platform you pick.
We had a similar problem with needing to share content across multiple Joomla! sites so we developed this extension: http://extensions.joomla.org/extension/simple-sharing
It is not very robust in terms of what it can share but it does let you share Articles across multiple sites and choose which sites and categories those articles get published into. I hope it works for you.
Thanks!