Newbie: How best to allow editors to manage simple tabular data sets?
Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2008 4:52 am
I'd like to use CMSMS for a client's site. I'm a newbie at CMSMS, although I've done a lot of PHP, Smarty and MySQL programming, years ago. The client's existing site has, amongst other content, a few pages that include lists of association members in various categories, lists of papers and so on. What module might I use to best allow editors to manage such data sets?
I've not used another CMS before apart from those I've rolled myself. I've used PhpMyAdmin though. Perhaps the client could just use that and I can write my own module to pull data out of tables, or use something that exists. Perhaps I've misunderstanding how CMSMS is supposed to be used.
The tables might be, for example:
organisations = Organisation Name | Person Name | Email
and
papers = Paper Title | Date | URL of PDF
So on the pages, I'd like a list of them, sorted by Organisation then Name. I'm envisaging having one or two Smarty templates somewhere that I'd use to define how the list or table would look on my page, then use a tag on the page to get the data out. And for editors, in the admin site, an automatically-produced form for creating/editing/deleting items.
The tag might look something like:
{clever_database_module_report table='papers' template='papers_list'}
Here, 'table' wouldn't be an actual table in MySQL; it's just referring one of the 'tables' I've created using the clever database module.
Is there a module out there with which I can basically set up my own little database, either flat or relational, that I can access without writing a module specially? Or do I need to just sit down and write a module? There seem to be a lot of little modules around that do pretty much the same thing. Isn't there some module that can be any of them, within reason?
Maybe I can do this using some Web 2.0 database-building site, maybe Google Base, and use their API from CMSMS so it can pull data from there... or maybe import the data from an Excel file, or Microsoft Access or something...
Obviously there are a million ways of doing this, but I'm wondering what the usual solution, if any, is for CMSMS developers or editors, to this sort of problem. And whether this is too much for CMSMS. Maybe Joomla has this sort of thing and I should that instead.
Toby, Missouri
I've not used another CMS before apart from those I've rolled myself. I've used PhpMyAdmin though. Perhaps the client could just use that and I can write my own module to pull data out of tables, or use something that exists. Perhaps I've misunderstanding how CMSMS is supposed to be used.
The tables might be, for example:
organisations = Organisation Name | Person Name | Email
and
papers = Paper Title | Date | URL of PDF
So on the pages, I'd like a list of them, sorted by Organisation then Name. I'm envisaging having one or two Smarty templates somewhere that I'd use to define how the list or table would look on my page, then use a tag on the page to get the data out. And for editors, in the admin site, an automatically-produced form for creating/editing/deleting items.
The tag might look something like:
{clever_database_module_report table='papers' template='papers_list'}
Here, 'table' wouldn't be an actual table in MySQL; it's just referring one of the 'tables' I've created using the clever database module.
Is there a module out there with which I can basically set up my own little database, either flat or relational, that I can access without writing a module specially? Or do I need to just sit down and write a module? There seem to be a lot of little modules around that do pretty much the same thing. Isn't there some module that can be any of them, within reason?
Maybe I can do this using some Web 2.0 database-building site, maybe Google Base, and use their API from CMSMS so it can pull data from there... or maybe import the data from an Excel file, or Microsoft Access or something...
Obviously there are a million ways of doing this, but I'm wondering what the usual solution, if any, is for CMSMS developers or editors, to this sort of problem. And whether this is too much for CMSMS. Maybe Joomla has this sort of thing and I should that instead.
Toby, Missouri