Dynamic content sections?

Kyanos · Post by **Kyanos** » Mon Oct 25, 2004 3:44 am

I am trying to make my front page have a static layout but with dynamically generated sections. Basically I want it to look like this:

Code: Select all

TITLE

SECTION 1
 - Item 1.1
 - Item 1.2
 - Item 1.3

SECTION 2
  SUBSECTION 2.1
    - Item 2.1.1
    - Item 2.1.2
  SUBSECTION 2.2
    - Item 2.2.1
    - Item 2.2.2
    - Item 2.2.3

I want to have my users be able to edit items in section 1, and add/edit items under the subsections in section 2 (the admin user would have to create the subsection). Ideally this all shows up on the main page, and is dynamically generated so that when a user adds something it shows up automatically. I have not been able to get anything dynamic like this to work yet.

Given how impressive some of the sites are that are listed in the CMS Show Off forum, I'm sure that CMS Made Simple is capable of doing what I want, once I figure out how! Can someone point me in the right direction?

Thijs · Post by **Thijs** » Mon Oct 25, 2004 8:47 am

As far as I know, this is not yet possible. I hope to add to multiple blocks to one page (somewhere is the distant future), but dynamically creating new ones is yet another story. However, a lot can be done using the WYSIWY editor in combination with some nice styles for for headers.

I'm thinking, probably the closest that is implemented right now, is the news module. Would that work for you?

Kyanos · Post by **Kyanos** » Tue Oct 26, 2004 4:08 am

Oh, that's unfortunate. That's the main reason I looked into using a CMS for this project instead of custom-writing my own PHP.

The news module would suffice, but would make each update discrete, where I would like to have everything more integrated.

I assume from your phrasing that this would not be a simple matter to implement from the current codebase. If this is something that would just require some experimentation and testing, I'm willing to see what I can fudge. I don't really know PHP yet, but it can't be that hard, can it?

Thijs · Post by **Thijs** » Tue Oct 26, 2004 8:10 am

We love all the help we can get

If you have used another programming language before, PHP is actually quite easy, and much better suited for web based applications than most other languages.

I think the easiest way to go would be to copy the news modules and try to work from there. Another thing is that, being a semi-static website CMS, the frontend (the actual webpages) does not have access authentication. Editing of the subsections should therefore be done through the admin interface.

Brit · Post by **Brit** » Mon Nov 08, 2004 11:43 pm

Hi, Thijs

I hope to add to multiple blocks to one page (somewhere is the distant future)

How far along on that are you? I'd like to do the same thing. I'm not a PHP expert, but I'd love to see your code & see if I can help....

(I'm currently working to create a fixed number of content blocks, to be called in the template
{content}

{content2}
etc. But ideally the content blocks could be defined dynamically by their CSS ids, and stored in a separate table linked by page_id....)

Thank you so much for all of your hard work.

-Brit

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