CMS Made Simple Forums

I have a series of articles on my website divided into categories by the year they were published. I'd like to make an archives page with a custom menu on it that lists the articles in each category and a brief description of the article (that would be entered on that article's content page). I could just make a list of links on the page by hand, but it would be very handy if it happened automatically as I added each new article page. So, I think I have this figured out in a way that's possible, I'm just a bit stuck on what goes where.

The structure of the pages in my CMS go like this:

Feature Articles
    > 2008
          >Article 6
          >Article 5
          >Article 4
    > 2007
          >Article 3
          >Article 2
          >Article 1

The site is currently up at: http://www.test.sportponymagazine.com/
I don't want this menu in the regular page menu because it's too much. I will feature the most current Feature Articles on the home page and then if they want to see archives, they can go to the Feature Article Archives and check out the list (custom menu).

Here are the steps I was looking at:

1. Create a (user-defined tag??) that would make another text area in my content pages, where I can enter the brief description of the article. I know this is possible as I used to use a template that had two text columns and each column had a separate form field on the content page, but I'm not exactly sure how to set it up.

2. Create the menu on the Archives page - set it up to call just the articles pages (start_element="1.2")

3. I think I would have to create another menu template that uses the UDT in #1 to add the brief description with each menu item. Again, not entirely sure how to do this but I am thinking the News module might provide an example.

Thanks for ANY help provided.

Chris

Hi,

I think you can get what you want with this piece of code:
http://forum.cmsmadesimple.org/index.php?topic=22988.0

There is also an explanation on how to use subchildren in a nested order.
http://forum.cmsmadesimple.org/index.ph ... 540.0.html

So on the page where you want this 'alternative menu'. You just insert the code from the second link and edit it to your needs.

For the summary in this menu you can do two things:
- Add a field to the template of the articles pages and fill that with a summary. Something like this: {content block="Summary" wysiwyg="true"}. This will get you a seperate summary field for each article page.

- Just get the content from the article and truncate that to only show the first ### of letters and a read more link. I used that like this: {$cgsimple->get_page_content($subchild.alias)|truncate:200} You can read more on truncate here: http://smarty.net/manual/en/language.modifier.truncate.php

Let me know if that solves it for you.