CMS Made Simple Forums

My first suggestion to new users is -- don't even start without a decent knowledge of HTML!

I have spent the last several weeks trying to get CMSMS 0.13 working for a commercial site and it has been a real learning experience. After self-tutoring ( is this the fourth time?) in adodb, adodb-lite, smarty, PHP and mysql, I have my desk quite full of books and screen dumps.

But, good work team! After struggling with Mambo, phpwebsite, and a dozen others, I think I finally found a CMS that can actually do real work.

Forms are always a pain in the neck, and CMSMS doesn't make them any simpler. Smarty really doesn't know much about forms and the CMS library works OK for inline checkboxes, but, of course, I had to do it the hard way and insert checkboxes in a database grid output.

Using FrontEnd as an example, I finally was able to force-feed the grid array with checkboxes, but it sure isn't one of my proudest snippets.

I haven't quite decided whether I have a solution in mind or if I am just ranting. But as I say in my real job -- if it was easy, anyone could do it.

I see you have the right attitude. Some users dont have any clue about basic html / css and want everything working. default templates can only do so much...

For your forms problems, are you talking about frontend or admin forms? did you test formbuilder?

smarty has a nice extension for form handling (cant remember the name right now, but do a search on this forum for smarty and forms) and I think we really need to write something new and cool for module developers

and welcome to cmcms club!

tsw wrote:
For your forms problems, are you talking about frontend or admin forms? did you test formbuilder?

It is a frontend  form that has a database grid that displays a list of items from which I need the client to choose. I tried a bunch of the Javascript grids but just ran out of interest in short order. So, I put an additional column in the grid with a checkbox that has the record ID as the value. It has to be done at the code level, since it requires pushing a  new value into the database array.  I see that other folks have seen the same type of problems and solved it in much the same way.  I'm sure it can be done with Javascript and CSS, but when you hit deadlines, that is not the time for "cute" programming -- you need a reliable and tested method and embedded checkboxes are not a bad interface.

I had a look at formbuilder, but even it has issues when you are talking about pushing the logic out to the template level.

I'm sure I will have the problem solved "Real Soon Now."