How to Add Dropcaps to Your CMS Made Simple Website

Last Updated on Tuesday, 12 June 2012 02:35 Written by Ken Griffith Sunday, 1 July 2012 12:00

In books and published works an oversized “Initial” fancy letter, or “Dropcap” is often used as the first letter of a book or chapter.  This is sometimes found in high quality website designs as well, but is not very common on sites with generated content due to the extra work involved to set it up. Here is a handy way to add dropcaps to your CMS Made Simple website.

I have made a little CMS Made Simple plugin called “Dropcaps” that you can install on your CMSMS site by saving it to the “plugins” folder of your web root.  Once you have done that, it will appear in your “tags” list under Extensions in the admin panel.

This plugin is a SMARTY modifier that parses a blob of text, detects the first block level element (paragraph or div), and then wraps the first letter in two <span> tags with certain classes like this:

Customizing Product Enquiry Forms with FormBuilder and Products Modules

Last Updated on Tuesday, 12 June 2012 02:35 Written by Ken Griffith Friday, 15 June 2012 12:00

Suppose you are building a catalog website in CMS Made Simple that uses the Products Module and you want to show a contact form on each product detail page. With this little trick you can customize the Subject line of the enquiry form using FormBuilder to include the Product Name automatically.

To do this, use the standard Contact Form in FormBuilder. we look up the field id of the Subject line in your Contact Form. You can do this by checking the “show field id” option in Formbuilder’s Preferences Tab.

Let’s say for example, the field number is “40″. Now, in your product detail template just put the following FormBuilder tag:

How to Add the Tagging Function to CMS Made Simple Modules Part 2

Last Updated on Tuesday, 29 May 2012 01:35 Written by Nic Bug Monday, 11 June 2012 12:00

In Part 1 we have learned how to assign multiple keywords (tags) to entries of CGBlog Module. Now I want to show you how to retrieve these tags in order to make them visible and clickable in the frontend and browse our entries by them.

We need a new “Summary Template” in CGBlog Module. Call it as you want like “Tag-Summary” and insert the following code (major code is just copied from sample):

How to Add the Tagging Function to CMS Made Simple Modules Part 1

Last Updated on Friday, 30 November 2012 06:15 Written by Nic Bug Wednesday, 6 June 2012 12:00

Tagging is a common and well known feature in Blog Software like WordPress. But unfortunately, it is missing in CMS Made Simple. In this article, I will show you how to add the feature into any module. You can see it in action here.

To understand how it works, I take CGBlog as our desired module in this case. I split the tutorial in two parts because we need new functions in the backend to let the author enter some keywords (tags) and we need the frontend management of the tags. Let’s start with the backend configuration.

Install CGBlog and dependencies first. Then go to CGBlog and add a new “Field Definition”.

How to Compress Your CSS With {cms_stylesheet}

Last Updated on Tuesday, 29 May 2012 12:55 Written by Ken Griffith Tuesday, 5 June 2012 12:00

CMS Made Simple attaches stylesheets to a page template with the {cms_stylesheet} tag. Since CMSMS version 1.10, this tag will automatically concatenate all of the stylesheets for a given media type into one CSS file.

You may not be aware that since version 1.10, you can use SMARTY tags inside of CMS Made Simple stylesheets. With a couple of small tricks, you can use this to compress your stylesheets.

Using [[strip]] Tags

In CMS Made Simple stylesheets, we use [[double braces]] instead of {curly brackets} as the SMARTY delimiter. This saves using a ridiculous number of {literal} tags.