CMS Made Simple Forums

Here is my problem... This is somewhat theoretical; I haven't gotten into coding issues yet as I'm still not sure the best way to handle this. I'm building a site for a magazine. Each issue contains some extra online articles. The page content for the articles goes under the Archives section (because that's where it's going to be in perpetuity). Now, I would also like to highlight the current issue's content in the menu. I had thought I would just create links in the menu as below:

1 Home
2 Current Issue (link to 4.1)
    2.1 Jan Article 1 (link to 4.1.1)
    2.2 Jan Article 2 (link to 4.1.2)
    2.3 Jan Article 3 (link to 4.1.3)
3 Advertising etc.
4 Archives
    4.1 January Issue
          4.1.1 Jan Article 1
          4.1.2 Jan Article 2
          4.1.3 Jan Article 3

But, since the children only show when you are on the parent page (or one of its siblings), obviously the 2.x menu items never show, because I'm never on page 2, I'm on page 4.1. This works OK enough, as the links do show, except they're under Archives instead of Current Issue...

My question is, would I want to try to create mirror pages for the Archived content? What I would like to do is hide all of 4.1 and 4.1.x in the menu when it is active as a Current Issue. I think there's something like this set up for multi-lingual use... but maybe that's like using a shotgun to get rid of a mouse... when a simple mousetrap would do, ha ha.

I suppose I can always insert new content under Current Issue (ie, actually have it be page 2 and 2.x) and change their parents by hand as they move to the Archives... would that be the most efficient way?

Suggestions would be appreciated. I'm still figuring out what I can do with CMS Made Simple I'm using CMS 1.2.3 and the Col de Crie template. The website is up at http://www.canadianarabian.com.

   

http://dev.cmsmadesimple.org/projects/contentaliases/ would do the trick.

If you named #4 as "Issues", instead of "Archives", then the links would show Issues/January Issue/..., which might be less confusing. Also, naming the issues like "January 2008",  "April 2008", etc. would make more sense as well.

Whatever you do, you're going to have to manually change something (link or name) as each new issue comes out.

Nullig

Thanks for the suggestions - they are named January 2008 on the actual site, I just skipped it in the example - I will check out Content Aliases and leave a note if it does the trick.

OK - I ran into this problem:

http://dev.cmsmadesimple.org/tracker/in ... 2&atid=165

"Content Alias doesn't work in pages with multiple content blocks, it repeats the content from the first block in all content blocks."

I don't think I'm up for editing xml...

Yea I saw that bug in the forge awhile ago, I don't use content aliases thus haven't looked for a work around.

Is there any way you can only use 1 content block per page?

If not, I think you are stuck with playing around with the menu manager

You know,  I probably could get away with that (one content block per page). I used the right-hand column for one author's bio, but that could easily be moved underneath the article - the right hand column is so skinny it's not entirely useful...

heh, i have found that to be a problem with 'complex' sites. "what can i change to make this work?" and in the process sacrifice design for functionality.

Well, I would consider myself a designer more than a programmer, but if it isn't functional then it doesn't help to look pretty does it! 

May I suggest using the News for your articles, this would always have the latest article up top...

You can use the category call to make links that you can style as if they were the menu...