How can I display multiple content items on a webpage (say on the frontpage)?

[docman]

Hi, this may sound like a naive question, but I could not find an answer to it, yet.

The idea is to display content items that belong to a category (say "frontpage"), one after the other on the front page.

Up to this point I was having difficulty in achieveing this, because:

1. contents cannot be assigned to categories
2. the {content} tag displays only one content (the default) on the frontpage
3. the {content} tag does not have a parameter ("category") that could be used to achieve this goal

Thaks for your help in advance.

[jmcgin51]

why not use the News module?  Category-based by default, and you can customize the templates so that no one has to know you're using a "news" module.

[docman]

I see. I have already looked at it, but did not think of changing the template. By any chance, can you tell me where can I find the template of a common content item?

[jmcgin51]

By any chance, can you tell me where can I find the template of a common content item?

I'm not sure I understand.  "Normal" page content doesn't have a "template", per se.  It is a mixture of plain text, HTML, and possibly CSS and Smarty or PHP tags.

[docman]

Thanks.

I guess I need to study the inner working of CMSMS a bit more. But perhaps this would be a legitimate wuestion:

what is the difference between a theme and a template?

Incidentally, I imported a theme (in a xml file). It does show up in the list, but does not have the usual attributes shown in the line across the list. Only the title is shown. Because of this I cannot even delete it. I assume it is stored in the database, this is why I cannot find it on the server.

Thanks again.

[calguy1000]

A theme consists of:
  - A single page template
  - Menu Template(s)
  - CSS
  - CSS Images

When imported into the database the page templates are initially marked as 'inactive'  IIRC, you can activate them in the Layout >> Templates page.

On your other subject, I think you're approaching things from the wrong angle.
CMSMS doesn't work like some other (package that cannot be named) packages..  we organize things into pages, and into pages goes 'content'.  There is no global concept of re-usable articles or 'categories', that do two things
a) good:  allow for flexibile organization of content
b) bad:    make things confusing for the user who just wants to edit the about-us page, or put some text on the 'contact-us' page.

For dynamic content, we use specialized 'modules', each with their own special features and ways of operating.  The news module allows creating time sensitive 'articles' that exist in a 'hierarchy'... and allows you to display those articles in numerous ways, and create RSS feeds from them.

So you may have to re-organize the way you think for simple sites using CMSMS.  Most of the functionality is available in one form or another, but just done 'differently'.

[docman]

Thanks for your description of the concept of CMSMS. I begin to realize the diferences between CMSMS and some other (well known) CMS systems.

What would be very nice is to have some good (working) examples. In addition to the perfect on-line help of CMSMS, this could get newcomers get going a great deal faster. More importantly, you may win them for good for CMSMS, while some (even the experiences ones) may just find it time consuming to figure things out.

[jmcgin51]

What would be very nice is to have some good (working) examples.

There are a lot of CMSMS sites listed here:
http://forum.cmsmadesimple.org/index.php/board,5.0.html

Or are you talking about tutorials of how to implement xyz scenario?  That's hard, because everyone has different needs.

[docman]

Thanks. The show-off is great, indeed.

Yes, I though of some good working examples.

[tinhat]

There are ways you can code this sort of functionality into your templates.

You can set up a menu section header and under it create pages for that section. You can then use CG Simple Smarty extension to create some smarty code in your template that will find the children pages of the section and pull in their content. See

http://wiki.cmsmadesimple.org/index.php ... ple_Smarty

[kendo451]

Each CMS has it's own theme specifications.  So Joomla themes don't work with Wordpress and vice versa. The same is true of CMS Made Simple.

If you need a theme, you can go to the free theme site for CMS Made Simple, or you can hire someone to take an existing template and turn it into a CMSMS theme for you, or you can read the documentation and learn how to do it yourself.

There is lots of good documentation and also video tutorials in the "Documentation" section of this website.