Frog CMS

So back to the discussion of reusable Parts or different content types. My impression is that you can simulate different content types by creating a Part that you use to identify the content type. You might leave this blank, because it's purpose is to identify the content type rather than being a Part you use, though you can use it. But if you had for example a content type called Themes, you could simply create a Part called "Themes"

Then you can do a select in the database: mysql> select distinct page_id from page_part where name="Themes";

That will give you a listing of the page ids for the content type Themes. You can then take the page id and do a query like: mysql> select content from page_part where page_id=21 and name="Author";

That will give you the Author Part associated with that page.

My question then is how do you do turn this into a plugin where you will get methods that you can use. Methods or classes where you can specify the content type and then be able to get the different Parts that correspond to it, and be able to use those parts, so you can output listings.

Unfortunately I'm not experienced enough to figure it out myself, but it seems like it should be possible.

What do you guys think?

so that you can do something like this in pseudoish code:

restaurants = customContent("Restaurants")

for each restaurant in restaurants { echo restaurant->name; echo restaurant->address; echo restaurant->phone; }

The reason I'd like this feature is I got really sick of adding data repetitively. Having to write markup for a listing of even say 20 items is annoying. And it's even worse because you're repeating yourself as long as each of those items have their own page, with the same information repeating itself. THen think about how you have to keep these in sync so that your page of listings corresponds to all the records you have.

So I think a feature like this is very important.

It would also make it possible to display the data in different forms on different parts of your site. Maybe somewhere say on the home page you want a widget that just displays one Part of a specific content type. For example, a widget that says "New Themes" and which displays just the name of the theme.

So another nice part of this would be if you can sort by date, so you can easily create these widgets that display new records for a specific content type.

hi tom, from what i can tell the tags don't inherit, so it may be somewhat less convenient than using a part to identify the content type...

hi david, i think i understand what you're saying about xml and it's not difficult to bring xml in to frog to just display it. i have a frog site that parses and displays news feeds using simplepie, and it wasn't a big deal to get it working.

but i think the difference here is that i need the data not just listed on one page but also with a page for each record (in this example, for each restaurant). i need it persisted in the frog database in other words. and i'm not sure how an external xml source would help. i don't want to code another form or application somewhere else to take the data and i don't want to write the xml markup either. so ideally i would just be able to use frog's existing parts.

hey guys, i came up with a simple solution that will return an array of arrays, but i'm not sure how to bring it into frog and turn into a re-usable plugin.

this is what i have so far: http://pastie.org/251962

please advise!

Thanks for the offer to help, Bdesign. I'll probably be in touch with you soon.

David, thanks for another great example of how this plugin could be used and what the benefits would be.

I guess with the plugin, what I'm really wondering about is how to access the database. I know Frog must have internal methods for making database calls so that I don't have to specify database name and authentication information. I tried to look for the Frog API documentation but the page is blank:

http://www.madebyfrog.com/docs/plugins-api.html

If I can just get that information I can probably put together a rough and simple plugin myself.

Bdesign, thanks for posting the information there. I looked up PDO and managed to get it working as a plugin. Basically this is what I have:

http://pastie.org/252691

It works fine and it's probably all I need right now, but I'd appreciate advice on how it can be better, more object-oriented etc.

Anybody who wants to use the code is welcome to. It just returns an array of all the records for the content type passed in. It returns an array of an array. You're on your own as far as sorting, pagination and whatever else.

For sorting you will probably want to use usort() and pass in whatever comparison method you want to use for that column. Pagination can be achieved using offsets. I actually haven't had a chance to deploy this yet, but I think it should work fine. If I run across problems I'll let you know.

This is what I have for doing URLs:

http://pastie.org/253262

It works fine for when you have the listing on a "directory" and all the pages as children of that directory. In other words if you have the listing on site.com/shops

then it'll work for the cases like: site.com/shops/victorias-secret site.com/shops/fredericks-of-hollywood

etc.

See the new thread in the plugins section: http://forum.madebyfrog.com/forum/topic/431