Frog CMS - Page types

Page types

11 posts, 7 voices

Feb 9, 2009 03:44 korkunck 3 posts	Hi, new to Frog. Is it possible to create new page types? I would love to be able to create a custom page type, for instance, for a portfolio site, where i could enter a project’s details(like, client/year/video/description) in a more structured way. thanks

Feb 9, 2009 08:14 eoghanobrien 23 posts	I’d also like to see something like this, ricks posted about this before with regard to page parts of different types, I think this could really improve Frog as an all-round CMS. I don’t see this happening soon though, definitely not before v0.9.5. What I’d really like to see would be a content type creation plugin so that you could set up your page types on the fly, similar to drupal, expression engine and symphony, this is becoming a common feature of modern CMS, it would be great to have it in Frog, although a lot of the attraction to using Frog is its simplicity, I believe a content creation feature would add more value than it takes away. Anyone else agree?

Feb 9, 2009 12:02 ricks 486 posts	korkunck, have you tried using the system of Page Parts? For your situation, it may be sufficient, because it doesn’t seem like your use case (portfolio of projects) would have a huge number of entries or require sophisticated sorting or data manipulation. eoghan, you’re talking about CCK for Frog? That could be an interesting plugin.

Feb 9, 2009 17:50 bugger 25 posts	I hope Frog gets a feature like this in the future. Something similar to Symphony with custom page types with different type of form fields.

Feb 10, 2009 01:33 David 1493 posts	I have all kinds of sympathy with what korkunck is asking about. Here’s my take on it: As ricks points out, page parts can take you a long way with simple “custom field” type duties. The fact that page structure is inherited from siblings means that once you set up a page with its special page-parts, then all subsequent new sibling pages (child of same parent page) get those parts automatically. This is very good! And in combination with the sort-children-by-page-part plugin (and see the user contributed plugins page, too), you can do quite a lot. Like Eoghan, I also use Symphony. It is an XML-based CMS, and it is built to provide this sort of flexibility. If you need sophisticated database querying capabilities, why not use a tool made with that objective? I had to find out what CCK was! Such a plugin would be a powerful addition to Frog’s capabilities, too, but it would have to be plugin, of course! @korkunck – meanwhile! :) the setup you describe is readily made with Frog, using the tabbed page-parts. If you want to explore further, just ask! :)

Feb 15, 2009 15:11 korkunck 3 posts	thanks for the replies. a few suggestions please, before i go get my hands dirty: this will be a video portfolio site. So each page will at least, have a title, a client, a link to a video file uploaded by ftp. If i tackle this with page parts, should i have a separate page part for each of those entries, or can i get away with only one page part and then parse this part with php somehow to get to each entry? thanks.

Feb 15, 2009 23:33 ricks 486 posts	If i tackle this with page parts, should i have a separate page part for each of those entries, or can i get away with only one page part and then parse this part with php somehow to get to each entry? Yes, separate Part for each entry. Think of Parts as form fields. Why would you want to put it all in one Part?

Feb 16, 2009 00:29 korkunck 3 posts	Why would you want to put it all in one Part? just ease of use…but, it would be good to have a customizable form as a page part.

Feb 16, 2009 02:49 Martijn (mvdkleijn) 651 posts	Just in case anyone is interested. I am thinking about doing a CCK type plugin once I have a little bit more time. Unless someone beats me to it. (hint, hint!) :-)

Apr 21, 2009 17:29 ricks 486 posts	I’m goign to add this thread here: http://forum.madebyfrog.com/topic/1179 Since I think it’s related and why not keep things together? So I was just looking at the “Page Type” dropdown option on the Page creation form, something I suppose I did not notice yet, because I never change it since the other options are Archives and 404—not stuff I generally need. But wouldn’t it be great, I thought, after taking another look, if I can just choose “Event” from that dropdown, and have it reload a page with the fields I would need for an Event, with javascript date pickers, autocomplete of location coming from the database, etc. Is this possible to achieve within the current Frog framework? Can I write a plugin that would do this?

Apr 21, 2009 17:33 ricks 486 posts	Specifically, I want to be able to create a page that stores data in both the standard Parts table and in tables generated by my plugin (for easy of relational queries). So the form would contain a mix of fields. Some of those fields will be sent to Frog’s Parts table, the rest will go into my plugins tables. I’m not asking that the form be generated automatically—I plan on creating the form by hand, but I need a way of loading my custom form in substitution of the standard Frog Page creation form. Is that possible?

Apr 22, 2009 05:38 jonte 32 posts	For simple parameters you could try a version of how I implemented parameters