Frog CMS

Hello,

ok, there is a bug, but I don’t know right now how I can fix this. The file ‘lib/Spyc.php’ must have the first char upper case.

Due to Photoshop on my mac, Adobe forced me to have a case-insensitive file system :(

UPDATE: new version is uploaded on github, also tested on external hoster :D

Hello everflight,

it’s not working with native PDO? Strange, but I must admit I also use the PDO-light version. I’ll look into it to find the differences.

I’m glad it worked finally, I already started to doubt myself. Maybe you would be so kind and post me your ‘structure’, so that I can see what people are doing with it (once you finished playing :D).

Have a nice working day
M

Hello everflight,

check the wiki entries for the syntax, I’ll add more information if needed.

Page part form fields are simple page_parts. You can access them regularly with:

$page->hasContent('name');
$page->content('name');

Hello everflight,

Hot damn it works!

thanks to the flexible interfaces of the Frog core.

Thanks for all your help. Very very useful plugin.

And BTW, the multiple values are encoded with json, you can use the PHP primitives for json to ‘split’ the values.

Have fun
M

Hello a.renz,

0.0.5 is buggy! Please update to the version 0.0.6.

UPDATE: github is having problems right now: ensure your have the commit: 735080f7eba227621bdb72f92af72e1cb3fec8a9

UPDATE2: version 0.0.6 fixes the PDO issues, too

M

Hello redcrew,

I noticed a.renz disabled PDO in order to get this plugin to work, which seems to me would potentially cause issues with Frog.

As you can see, as of version 0.0.6 it works with and without PDO now. So there is no need to use PDOLite if not necessary. You can keep the USE_PDO with true in your config.php.

I’ve read the explanation of page part forms five times now, but still have no idea what its function is, nor how to use it. Can someone explain in the simplest terms under what circumstances I would use “page part forms”?

First of all, your don’t have to. It’s a plug-in and not part of the Frog core. If you see no use-case or benefit for it, there are chances you might not need this plug-in.

I’ll tell you my motivation for this plug-in and maybe it clarifies things a little bit.

Frog has build in support for page parts. In a pristine Frog installation you have the ‘body’ page part as default. There you can add continuous text as much as you like, but with no structural information. For example if you want to display more content on the site and the content is not part of the main content (‘body’ page part), you need another ‘container’ to store this information. E.g. attached to your root page there is the ‘sidebar’ page part that inherits the content to its children. In your presentation layer (layout and body page part) you just call $this->content('sidebar', true) to display the page part ‘sidebar’ even if this page part is not attached to the current page you are viewing. On the other hand you can overwrite the content by defining your own ‘sidebar’ page part for this page and your new content gets displayed instead. This is probably the most flexible part of the Frog CMS.

Sometimes there is the case that you want to add more structured information to the site. e.g. your want to add keywords, a custom style sheet, select pre-defined values from a list, set a rating, etc. To some point you can use the build-in metadata fields from Frog (and I strongly encourage to do so), but sometimes the fields for your particular use case is not build-in. For simple metadata I created the plug-in page_metadata, with this plug-in you can add simple ‘key-values’ fields to your page. From the admin user interface you select the tab ‘more metadata’.

Sometimes also simple metadata fields are not enough. My use-case: customer website with different products and the corresponding product descriptions. Each product is a page, there is an intro description as well as a detailed description. As a good Frog citizen I created an extra page part ‘intro’ besides the existing ‘body’ to maintain the content separately for each product. You might say: ‘hey, use an excerpt and split your main content with a regex!' —and you are right. But in my case it was simpler for the customer to have two separate textareas to maintain the two descriptions.

As part of the core user interface of Frog, page parts are organized in tabs and only allow textareas with filters —even if you just need a simpler element e.g. for a timestamp. Here comes the use of the page part forms.

Instead of creating all page parts for every product and inherit a not filled-out-warning (user forgot to fill out the second tab), I define some form fields that should be displayed instead. Due to the flexible storage of the Frog core, this form fields are stored as page parts in the back-end. This gives me the flexibility to display page parts on one page without a tab interface and to some level custom form elements (e.g. drop down, radio, etc.) based on pre-defined values. Another benefit is that in your presentation layer it makes no difference how the page part was created, you just display the content with $page->content('intro').

So why still bother your might ask? Well with page part forms you are able to define a specific back-end user interface on page level without starting to write your own plug-in.

E.g. you can create a simple event calendar. Just add the fields you need (e.g. location, price, person capacity, loudness, date, etc.) apply this form to a page and display the child pages/events at your master page (e.g. the archive page in your default Frog installation). Then you can also display only the main content (‘body’) if you display this particular page/event with additional information that is not displayed at the overview page.

Of course the plug-in can never be so flexible and feature rich as a ‘real’ plug-in solution, but it helps you to create custom content and interfaces very quickly.

Hope this outlines the purpose of this plug-in and clarifies some open questions. If there are still open questions, just post to this thread I’ll be eager to answer them ;)

M