CMS Made Simple Forums

I like what I see in CMSMS. I need to redesign my school's website and I need to keep the ability for teachers to enter daily homework on their own without needing to know html. Does CMSMS have a module that will allow people to post homework similar to this -  http://pickeringschool.org/cluster51.php?action=homework?

It depends on what you want the Teachers interface to look like.

I could setup almost any module with custom fields (news,cgblog,companydirectory) to have a front-end display like that.

ajprog

I am totally new to CMSMS so I'm not sure what you're talking about. The old site used PHP/MySQL. I just need the teachers to be able to login - enter homework - and then have it display on the web page for students and parents. Currently, the homework doesn't get archived, new homework overwrites the old homework. I'd like to be able to archive the homework for reference.

It can be done with the News module. Create a Category for each class. Custom fields for all the data. Create a summary template to match your current display. Then on you page have a module call {news limit=1 category='cluster_5'} which will display the latest article in that category.

If you want the teachers to work ahead you can have the article in draft status so the teachers can fill them out and the just publish them when they want it to be displayed on the site.

Thanks for the suggestion. Is there an example of this that I can see?

The best thing to do is play around with it.

What I would do (slightly different than what was suggested above)

* Create one category called 'homework'
 * We need the category because you might need the News module for general news as well.
 * Create custom fields called "Monday", "Tuesday", etc.
    * Make sure 'Public' checkbox is checked.
    * Use 'Text Entry' type. (default)
* Create a news article for each class.
 * Assign it to the 'homework' category.
 * The most recent 'post date' will show up first, so play around with the 'post date' field to get the order you want.
 * Title each one like 'English', 'Math', etc.
 * Put nothing in the 'Summary' field
 * Put anything in the 'Details' field. Not needed for this application, but it is a required field.
 * You should see: Monday, Tuesday, etc.. fields.. This is where you put your homework information.

* Have each teacher click on their News 'article' (class) in the admin panel and update the "monday, tuesday, etc" fields.

Assuming you have a default install, look at the home page. On the left you will see your information (Under 'News'), albeit in a ugly format. Now all you need to do is change your news summary template to organize the data the way you want. (look at the bottom of the news summary template for the $entry->fields part) The default news summary template uses certain CSS classes for each element. You need to adjust the html to match your needs and change the classes to the ones you want, and configure your stylesheet to match what you need.

The best thing to do is to start off with a default install, look at the News summary template, the News stylesheet, and see how they did what they did. Now you need to adjust those elements to match what you want to show.

Now you need to configure your home page so that your regular News only shows your 'News' category and not your homework. On your homework page, configure the {news} call to only show the homework category, using the special summary template you created.

This sounds complicated, but the beauty of this is that it is completely configurable, instead of just installing a module that might do this, but not exactly how you want. The 'News' module is very flexible and can be [mis]used to do any number of things.