CMS Made Simple Forums

Hi,

I recently built a site using CMSMS with great success, however as I get deeper into developing the site I’m faced with more and more testing stuff. The CMSMS version can be viewed here: http://www.asimjanjua.com/admin/index.php?page=home

I originally built a static version of the site. Now that I have got most pages working out of CMSMS, I’m stuck on making this page dynamic: http://www.asimjanjua.com/jmt/news/news.php (this is the original static version and not the CMSMS version) what I would like to do is make the right column dynamic, so that it is feeding content into the body of the site, its working as I want in the static version (if you click on the first box) but I just wanted to know how I go about making this dynamic via CMSMS, is it possible?

I used the AJAX functionality from the dhtmlgoodies website to achive this affect.

Thank you

i dunno why you can't just use the news function that's built into the cmsms core.. you get more functionality, easier content management, and infinitely better accessibility.

after poking around what content is there... i would think that the owners of the site would want to reach as many people as possible... hiding content behind scripts only presents an unnecessary barrier between site visitor and site content.

text browsers, screen readers, no-javascript (including google!)? no news content at all..  in firefox, the news doesn't print past the first page; and since the uri never changes, individual news items aren't even bookmarkable.

IMHO, the so-called 'latest and greatest' is not necessarily the best solution... just because 'can', doesn't mean you 'should'.. 

as far as doing what you are doing, and doing it in cmsms, you should be able to recreate that same page (using static html files as your data source, not the core news module) in cmsms as a normal content page..

Kermit,

Hands-down, your completely right in terms of accessiblity for both users and Search Engines the AJAX script I have used has many disadvantages, as you have pointed out.

I have a few questions about the news module,

1. I have deleted all occurrances of the news module in my current template, whats the quickest way to get these back.
2. I would have approx. 3 news modules in differenet sections of the site, I'm sure this is possible but can you point me in the right direction?
3. How do I find the link to each news section, so that I can have a page dedicated to all news items, i.e on the left menu I would like a link called "Latest News" how do I find the link/url that displays all the news items?

Thanks for your help.

Probably the easiest way to get what you want done would be to set up 3 different news categories.

The links you are looking for are in the form of a cms module tag -ie. {news [options] }

If you have a look at the help documentation for the news module, its located in your admin section:
admin/listmodules.php?action=showmodulehelp&module=News

for example, if you'd like to show only items from one of your categories, you could do this: {news category="1"}
(optional) category="category" - Only display items for that category. Use * after the name to show children. Multiple categories can be used if separated with a comma. Leaving empty, will show all categories.

to set up a 'news' page with all your items on it, just goto pages->add new content->change type from content to news.
fill out a menu header and title, and there you go.  You'll get a page displaying all your news from all categories, similar to this:
http://www.justanothercorporation.com/t ... ?page=news

so to get it back into your template, the only thing you have to do is just add the {news} back into the sidebar.

Hi,

Thank you for your instructions, they were spot on.

Asim

asim wrote: Hi,

Thank you for your instructions, they were spot on.

Asim

no problem, glad I could be of some help.