Why CMSMS Is Great For Designers.
I was recently asked why I think CMS Made Simple is great for designers. This led me to thinking about just what is defined by the term designer and is there actually such a thing as a stereotypical "Web Designer"? The common consensus seems to be that there are two types: The more traditional graphic designers who prefer to create mock ups in a program such as Photoshop and perhaps code up the pages in Dreamweaver, and those whose first instinct is for coding and prefer to create in the browser.
However, things have become a little blurred in recent years with the advent of more powerful design tools, and frameworks such as Bootstrap and Foundation. So I would suggest that it is probably a little more complicated than putting people into nicely defined boxes and that designers will use the various techniques at their disposal to achieve the desired end result.
Hey, I'm a designer not a coder!
Whichever method is used, ultimately a web page will boil down to good old HTML and CSS to determine its layout and style. One of the things I love about CMSMS is that you don't need any advanced coding skills to transfer an HTML page into a fully functional template. Armed with only the most basic knowledge of Smarty, it is very gratifying to see just how quickly a static page design can be translated into a system which is easily updated by the end user.
Other Content Management Systems require a more intense degree of coding in order to incorporate the basic HTML and CSS into their various templating systems. One popular CMS, for example, requires several different files to be created with each one having its share of PHP statements inserted at various points within. Miss a semicolon or forget to nest things properly, and all sorts of problems will arise. I'm willing to bet that there have been some who have thrown their hands up in frustration at the challenge.
In comparison, CMS Made Simple is a true designer-friendly system which simplifies the templating process and allows the designer to concentrate on creating beautiful and functional websites which users love. Every page can have its own template if required, and even the most crazily complicated layout is easily achieved with a little knowledge of Smarty.
Design Manager
If you haven't tried CMSMS 2 yet then I urge you to try a test installation. I know we're still in Beta, but the new Design Manager is a thing of beauty and simplifies template management even more by bringing everything together in the one place.
Instead of the separate Menu Manager and Global Content Blocks in previous CMSMS versions, we now have one Design Manager section with five tabs: Templates, Categories, Template Types, Stylesheets & Designs. Together they unify the control of our page layouts and enable creating, editing and organizing of any type of template. A set of related templates are organised into a 'Design' and, for particularly large or complex designs, templates can be further grouped into Categories if required. There is also a clever filter for isolating templates and stylesheets from a particular Design or module which makes working with complex set ups a whole lot more manageable.
So it can be seen that with a website built on the CMSMS platform, consideration has been given not only to the functionality of managing content by its end users, but also to the creation and management of a website by its designers and developers. The clue is in the name: CMS Made Simple.
I'm always banging the drum for simplicity and anything that makes my life easier can't be a bad thing in my opinion. And that is why, compared to other Content Management Systems out there, I can confidently say that CMS Made Simple is great for designers.
Tony Williams
@tdlwebs
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My Ten Favourite Smarty Tags
This time around I wanted to go a little bit 'Top of the Pops' on you all. Now, unless you are a British child of the sixties to early nineties, that will mean nothing to you. So to try and be a little more international I am also going a bit Mega Top 50 (thanks 'The Netherlands') and a little Top 40 (thanks 'Canada' - try to be a little more imaginative).
Ok, so now I have likely confused you all thoroughly, what I am actually doing is giving you run down of my top ten Smarty tags. Those tags that without which, I couldn't use CMSMS to its fullest potential. Those golden bits of code that mean I can design, develop, and deliver the exact site that the client wants, time and time again.
Of course, I'm going to cheat - I will be including CMSMS-specific tags as well as Smarty tags, plus of course a couple of core module tags. Something tells me no one will mind.
So, without further ado...
At 10: {cms_breadcrumbs}
Ok - it's an old classic and it's simple, but still, without it, there'd be many more aimless souls wondering the Internet. Essential.
At 9: {cmsms selflink}
Oh the trouble I got into in the early days when I didn't use this. Such a simple tag! Using it means that you link to the page alias rather than hard coding an HTML link. For me that's a big help because I switch pretty urls on at 'go live' so any hard-coded, in-page links would need changing. By using cms_selflink (and I tend to use it with the href="" modifier to make it grab the just the url in a normal link), problem solved.
At 8: {get_template_vars}
For those regular moments when you think 'darn, what variables do I even have in this page?' This is how you find out.
At 7: {redirect_page}
The redirect page is a little star. I often use it with the {if} tag (see below). One way I often use it is to extend the login redirect of the Front end users with 'if' and the custom content module. Simply put, I'll add a base member portal and then redirect different member groups to their own homepages within it e.g.
{if ccUser::memberof('members')}{redirect_page page='members-home'}{elseif ccUser::memberof('advanced_members')}{redirect_page page='advanced-members-home'}{/if}
At 6: {literal}{/literal}
Curly brackets, or braces - what happens when you need them in a non-Smarty way? For that little in-template jQuery, or the Google Analytics code, for example. With the literal tags, the problem is solved. Everything within them gets ignored by smarty. Add curly brackets to your heart's content! (note: {ldelim} and {rdelim} are another option to echo curly brackets.)
At 5: {global_content}
Don't leave home without it! I use this in all my templates. Heck, I use this everywhere. At the very least, splitting out header and footer areas of a template into a global content block means no having to go in and edit the headers in all templates (Laughing? - Chuckle away! I did it for about a year back in 07 when I first started using CMSMS). And that's one of a myriad of uses.
At 4: {menu}
How can one not love menu? Coupled with some simple additions in the menu templates, the output from this module tag can be anything from the simplest of unordered lists to a single page scrolling site with anchors. An incredibly powerful module - so much so, that next time I'll be concentrating on an article to deal with some of the menu tips and tricks you can use.
At 3: {news}
News is like that kid you went to school with who was really good at sport, but also good at maths and art: Sickeningly versatile. If news was an actual friend, you may well have throttled it for being too popular. Seriously - news can turn its hand to so many different tasks with a few basic CMSMS and Smarty skills. If you have anything which needs a summary and then more info - news in the core is a good place to start.
At 2: {assign}
Both a tag in its own right (e.g. {assign var="squirrel" value="nuts nuts nuts"} - now you have the variable {$squirrel}) and a modifier for a host of other tags ({content assign="main_content"}. For me, the most useful feature is once a CMSMS tag is assigned to a variable, I can test to see if the variable has any content. Great for creating things a one or two column layout template, depending on which content blocks get filled in.
And at 1: {if}{else}{/if}
I’d argue this is more of a bit of programming than a tag, but as it’s Smarty that's not possible! Either way, it's the door to a world of possibilities. The lowly 'if' tag is the starting point to making your sites think, so your clients don't have to!
So there you have it. Of course each to their own - this is simply my most used tags. There are plenty more tags in the tags section of the admin (extensions menu), in the modules that you install, and, of course, that are coded into Smarty (browse the Smarty website for more enlightenment). So what do you use? Tell us on Facebook or Twitter. We'd love to know!
Written by John Scotcher
@jbookguy
