CMS Made Simple Forums

CMSMS out of the box is fantastic, but I was hoping to use it for a simple product review site. What that means is I was hoping my product pages could all have a default header something like this (but completely open to CSS styling):

Title: Product Title
Company: Company
Rating: stars
Image of the product.

I realize that I could simply add these manually every time in HTML but I was hoping there would be a way to fill these dynamically, such as storing the company name in a variable, and perhaps storing the product image as a variable like {title}.gif. Am I making sense here? I didn't see a way to add custom fields to pages so I'm not sure how to go about this. I'm guessing that user defined tags and global content blocks might come in handy but that's where my experience reaches its limits.

Thanks for any help!

have a look at Cataloger or the CompanyDirectory modules. they will take alittle bit of tweaking and learning but they should be able to do what you have asked.

CompanyDirectory looks very promising for this. Thanks for the tip. I will report back to this thread after I've tinkered with it for a bit.

ive just started on implementing CompanyDirectory, so definitely let me know how it goes!

Cubix , I saw some good progress in CompanyDirectory yesterday with creating the custom fields for a product review as well as styling them with the details template. A couple of gotchas have already emerged, however:

1. Pretty URLs aren't pretty with CompanyDirectory. They look like companies\1\68 when I want them to look like widgets\blue-widgets - I have no idea what to do here but I read somewhere that a new version of CompanyDirectory is imminent, so perhaps this will be addressed. I think this might be a show stopper if there is not a work around.

2. I am unsure how to call a CompanyDirectory page just like it is a normal content page, so that when I click on it in the menu it simply shows the details page of the company (in my case the product review) rather than a summary that I then must click to reveal the details. Probably there is a simple solution for this.

I hope that a future version of CMSMS will allow custom field definitions for standard content pages. That would be ideal.

unfortunately there are a few limitations with CompanyDirectory (especially with PrettyUrls)

1. firstly you are stuck with the \1\68 as this is the ID and the returnID. due to the id being the unique field, and the way CD works, we are stuck with that. you can change the 'companies' part, check out lines:

action.default.php line 129 & companydirectory.module.php line 143 - 147

with a few further modifications, you should be able to achieve widgets\blue-widgets\1\61 (or 1\61\widgets\blue-widgets i guess)

if you cant live with the 1\61 check out the Cataloger module, that uses pretty urls like above. i started with the cataloger module for that very reason, however, i have now moved to CD due to its flexibility and it ties in with frontendusers etc...


2. how the summary and details look are all in the templates, have a look in the admin section. create a new idea (leaving the default as a reference) and start playing round.

thx cubix, that renaming tip worked.

I may actually steer clear of CompanyDirectory for now, as I have since discovered that I may be able to achieve what I want by using content blocks.

Right now I am creating a product review template with various content blocks like this one:
These then show up as fields I can edit on my content pages. Further down in my template I'm outputting these fields before the main {content} like so (in the context of a table):
This probably isn't the best approach in terms of flexibility and future growth, but since I'm new and my site needs aren't too sophisticated, I'm having fun learning the ropes by trial and error.