I'm looking for the following... can anybody point me to anything that currently exists in this field? Trying not to reinvent the wheel.
Basically a CMS system where I can setup a Form type though an interface.
Basically say that this type of data has a text field called Name, a Date field called "Start Date" and an email field called "Owner". And that together is a Node type called "Project"
Then a data entry person can go and fill in multiple projects and perhaps save them into different categories.
And then I can export the results as XML or JSON.
Thats the wist list... does something like that exist? or am I going to have to program it fresh?
You could certainly take a look at the open source Hippo CMS - it allows you to create your own content types pretty much in the way you're describing (disclaimer: I'm CTO of the company).
A "document type" in Hippo CMS is both the type definition (which nodes go where, what are they called, what type are they) as well as the form to input the content into. The form is build up from different editing fields, and there are fields available for Date, String, HTML Field and so on. If you need a very specific kind of field, then you can create your own and add it to the installation as a plugin.
Hippo is based on the Java Content Repository specification (JCR), which deals with Nodes in a hierarchical structure. If you're looking for a Java solution - then this might be what you need. But from what you're writing, I think you won't even have the need to dive into the Java internals. You can use the XML Export from the Console web interface to get the content out, or add a REST API that exposes the content either as XML or as JSON. For this, you'll need to go a bit deeper. More info on this is available on the community website.
Feel free to try the online demo installation. After you've logged in as one of the 'admin' users, navigate to the "Browse" perspective and open up the "Configuration" accordeon (it's all the way in the bottom of the screen, right above "Taxonomies"). Here you can work with the Document Types.
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Currently I work an an app where the user can create products for a catalog. The status is, he can do this in one language, data gets send to the backend and saved. The next step would be to make this creation process ready for multiple languages e.g. english or french. The behaviour should be the following, he choses the language inside a drop down field and gets a form in the selected language.
The problems I encountered and my solution process till now:
1) How should the view handling be? Should I create a new fragment for every language and exchange the content? If Im correct that would mean I would need to destroy and create fragements for the languages, right? And then create them with a binded model again.
2) How should I handle the model/models? Should I create one model with the data they share e.g. creation date and create a model with language related attributes? That would be my solution right now.
Maybe you already did something similiar or have some thoughts about this, thanks for any help!
You should do neither of those things. There are mechanisms in place, generally referred to as i18n that help you with this process. UI5 help available here:
https://ui5.sap.com/sdk#/topic/df86bfbeab0645e5b764ffa488ed57dc
and
https://ui5.sap.com/sdk#/topic/5424938fc60244c5b708d71b50a0eee4
In summary, translations should be done using the i18n mechanisms and the oData logon language.
Logging into the application, assuming it's hosted on an SAP gateway or SCP / Launchpad, the user's current logon language will drive at least all standard SAP translatable texts like the labels returned from data elements in your oData services. The appropriate url parameter is sap-language=EN, but it's set automatically from the current browser settings. Generally, you don't have to worry about this.
The same browser settings drive which particular i18n file is loaded. This could be specific like en_US for American English, or fr for French.
If you code your app without any hard coded translations but always follow the rules in the links above, adding a language should be trivial.
These translations could probably be triggered programmatically via a dropdown as well but I have never tried that since it's extra steps for my users.
I have a "Language" document type, and under my site's Content I have a folder called "Languages" which contains all the languages we support.
I created a custom Data Type called "Languages Dropdown", and I want this dropdown to be populated from the instances of "Language" present at a specific path.
This is my default Sitecore thinking in action. Is such a thing even possible in Umbraco?
Certainly - first of all, take a look at nuPickers and see if that can do what you want - 99% of the time this sort of thing can be handled really easily with that package:
https://our.umbraco.org/projects/backoffice-extensions/nupickers
Documentation can be found here:
https://github.com/uComponents/nuPickers/wiki
We are trying to make a document-managemnet / knowledge management portal using Plone 4. We would like a forms / structured data feature in our webapp with posibility of defining forms through the web, having workflows using these forms and being able to create reports from them (preferably in some format that facilitates simple and nice looking or skinnable printouts).
Any pointers to modules, documentation and/or literature would be great. Thanks.
Dexterity in combination with collections for reporting should get you what you need.
http://plone.org/products/dexterity
PloneFormGen is a good solution for through the web creation of standalone forms but as soon as you need your form to be workflowed, reviewed inside plone or later edited and updated then a "Content Type" is normally the most appropriate way to model this inside an CMS. Dexterity is the recommended way to build content types going forward. It has the ability to create and edit content types through the web.
For more indepth information of developing a Dexterity based solution see http://plone.org/products/dexterity/documentation/manual/developer-manual
Archetypes would be an alternative way to create content types.
Collections can be used for basic through the web reports. To make this work on the new fields in your content types you'd need to make the fields usable inside collections which I'll leave out of this explanation. For more advanced reports I'd suggest a simple BrowserView which lets you use any python you want to compose your report.
The add-on http://plone.org/products/uwosh.pfg.d2c product with PloneFormGen, is going to be the best fit for your situation.
uwosh.pfg.d2c creates content objects from your PloneFormGen form submissions. You can then use it with placeful workflows to give you a custom workflow on the submission.
If you'd rather not use placeful workflows, it also allows you to specify the content type it'll save the form to so you can have a different content type, with a different workflow on every form.
Dexterity would work too, but the TTW tool is not nearly where PloneFormGen is.
Simply: http://plone.org/products/ploneformgen
I have a website that has related pages. They have links that point back and forth to one another but I have no integrated system, nor do I know what that would mean.
What is the minimum code that a group of web pages must have to be considered a Content Management System (CMS). Is it that all the settings are in the database and the pages are generated somehow? Is there some small snippet that all my pages could share that makes them a CMS, database or not?
Thanks. I was also hoping not to have to study a giant CMS to see what makes it a CMS . After maybe a basic understanding I would know what I was looking for.
edit: here's why I ask about code. Whenever I have looked at a CMS, and maybe they aren't all the same, I saw that to develop a module you always had to inherit from certain classes and had some necessary code. I didn't know if there was some magic model that I just don't get that all cms makers understand.
edit: perhaps my question is more about being extendable or pluggable. What would a minimum look like? Is it possible to show that here?
edit: how about this? Is something a CMS if it is not extendable and/or pluggable?
I think this is really impossible to say. We all manage content. The "system" is just whatever mechanism you use to do so(dragging and dropping in Explorer or committing content changes via a SQL query). To say there is a minimum amount of code needed really isn't indicative. What is indicative is how often you find yourself making mistakes and how easy it is for a given user of a given skill level and knowledge to execute the functions in the designed system. That tells you the quality/degree of what you have in place being worthy of being called a "CMS."
Simply put a CMS is an application that allows the user to publish and edit existing web content.
In response to the edit:
A "good" CMS allows of extensibility. By using inheritence you can extend the functionality of a CMS outside of the core components provided. That's the magic.
About Extensibility:
Depending on the language/framework you want to build your CMS with, you can load pages or controls(ASP.NET) using command built into the framework. Typically what is being done is a parent class/interface is being defined that forces an module that is to be developed to follow some given standards:
Public MustInherit Class CMSModule
'Here you will define properties and functions that need to be global to all modules being developed to extend your CMS.
public property ModuleName as string
End Class
public class PlugInFooCMSPage
inherits CMSModule
end class
Then it's just a matter of simply loading a module dynamically in whatever construct a given language/framework provides.
Ultimately, a CMS is a system that lets you manage content, so it needs an user interface that is dedicated to letting you easily create, edit and delete pages on your website.
However, it's fairly usual to expect from a CMS to provide a browser-based WYSIWYG page editor, file uploading, image resizing, url rewriting, page categories and tags, user accounts (editor, moderator, administrator), and some kind of templae system.
Without dragging you into a theoretical explanation of what a CMS is and what it's not, perhaps some tutorials on the building methodology of a CMS will help you better understand.
http://css-tricks.com/php-for-beginners-building-your-first-simple-cms/
http://www.intranetjournal.com/php-cms/
A Content Management System is a System that Manages Content. :)
So if you got many pages that share the same layout, you can create a system that stores the content into a database and when a page is requested, it gets that content, merges it with a template that contains the page header, menu, etc.. and outputs the result.
The basis idea is that you don't want to copy HTML pages, and have to edit hundreds of them when you want to change your layout.
Such a system can be very complex, featuring wysiwyg editors, toolbars, version control, multiple user publishing and much more, but it could be as simple as a single page behind a standard loging, that contains only an input field for the title and a textarea in which you type the html content.
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.