Author Topic: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion (Read 59,713 times)

jgpaiva · « **Reply #25 on:** May 21, 2006, 10:56 AM »

Ok, now i can comment on the images: THOSE LOOK GOOD!
EhEh... Very nice, i like the idea! I already tried finding something similar, because it's hard to make good looking posts only with bbcode. As for images, why not mantaining the system we have right now? The [attach=#] is easy to use, and allows for (almost) exact placement of images.

jgpaiva · « **Reply #26 on:** May 21, 2006, 12:07 PM »

Ok, i was thinking... If we pick a post from the forum, and blog it, wouldn't it appear out of context? How could this be solved?
I think that when something was blogged, that something should have an additional comment from the blogger. Or is there a better solution? (or am i missing the point, here?

)

mouser · « **Reply #27 on:** May 21, 2006, 12:11 PM »

Quote

I think that when something was blogged, that something should have an additional comment from the blogger

this is an interesting point -
if you are always embeddeding/extracted (blogged) the first post of a thread then i don't think it will be a problem.. but if you were grabbing posts from the middle of a thread it might require something else..

but there are other issues like a long post should only display an intro text and say "click for more" maybe..

Carol Haynes · « **Reply #28 on:** May 21, 2006, 01:02 PM »

How about including blog tags in the forum? Something like:

Code

[BLOG]
Blog text

[/BLOG]

Which when display shows the first 5 lines with a Read more button?

This could probably be easily acheived by modifying the SPOILER code or to be honest there is nothing to stop using SPOILER anyway.

Code

Intro Para

[SPOILER=Read More ...]
Rest of text
[/SPOILER]

mouser · « **Reply #29 on:** May 21, 2006, 01:11 PM »

i was thinking something similar actually..
the only thing we have to figure out is.. often the person posting wont be the person adding the entry to the blog page.

so a moderator or admin might "promot" a post to the blog view, not the original author.

so in this case there are 2 choices:
1) have admin edit the post to add special intro tags (downside = admin has to edit post and it shows up as edited by ..)
2) when admin says to blog a post, simply COPY the post rather than linking to it, then admin can choose what text to leave out. advantage is it lets admin cutomize the blog posts a bit if it needs to be (edit title, text, pic). i think this might be the way to go.

Carol Haynes · « **Reply #30 on:** May 21, 2006, 01:18 PM »

How about having a "Proposed BLOG" section - then any editing can be done by the original poster and a mod/admin by agreement, once it is in final form the initial post can be moved to the live BLOGS area where the initial post is protected and others can post responses.

In the "Proposed BLOG" section there could be a sticky guidance article to get a uniform look and feel.

Suitable posts (by agreement with the author) could be copied to the "Proposed BLOG" section for tweaking etc.

Could you use a static page to point to new BLOGs with the brief extract automatically?

Could this actually be a possible overall solution - use the Forum as the main area for content as well as the forum (hiding areas from forum posts if necessary) and using a few static pages to grab relevant content to point to the appropriate forum pages?

Carol Haynes · « **Reply #31 on:** May 21, 2006, 01:22 PM »

One other thought - is it possible in SMF to apply different templates to some forums - or are there any mods that might do that? That way specific areas could be given their own look?

mouser · « **Reply #32 on:** May 21, 2006, 01:23 PM »

thats an interesting idea carol. there is no way to do that built in, but it probably wouldnt be too hard to modify..

jgpaiva · « **Reply #33 on:** May 21, 2006, 02:09 PM »

I like the [blog][/blog] tag idea. The blogger could make a post on the same thread, with that tag, where he would quote the other post.
Another advantage about this is that the same thread that had the blogged post will also have the blog entry, which makes the comments for both the post and blog entry be at the same place (which i consider fulcral, to avoid having the same information in 2 different places), and also because it'll be easier to see the blog entry when browsing the forum, because it'd be like a regular post.

I also think what you mentioned, mouser, is important, cutting long posts should be done, to avoid having big blog entries.

Another good thing about the [blog] tag is that (i think) it would make it easier to add new bloggers, because it wouldn't imply having to modify posts.

mouser · « **Reply #34 on:** May 21, 2006, 02:28 PM »

im not sure i understand what you are saying jgpaiva;
as i understand the [blog] tag idea it's more like this:

blog entries and articles will be made from posts (you dont need to add the [blog] tags for that).
the only issue is that you could allow people to indicate which parts of their post should be extracted and displayed in the blogs or article intro. at least that is my idea.

a better term would be [intro] [/intro] which you could use to indicate which short text to use as an intro.

Carol Haynes · « **Reply #35 on:** May 21, 2006, 02:53 PM »

That's why I thought SPOILER could do the work now ...

An new blog post woul look like this:

Quote

This is my introduction to my blog post

Read more ...
This is the rest of my blog post

Perhaps the BLOG tag could use the existing spoiler code to do this but modified so that:

1) When you hit button the button is removed or changed to "Hide again ..."
2) The text is expanded within the thread as for spoiler but not in its own box just as part of the whole message

You could always have a set of BLOG tags so that you can set up standard formatting ...

eg.

Code

[BLOGTITLE]A New Blog[/BLOGTITLE]
[BLOGINTRO]This is my introduction to my blog post[/BLOGINTRO]
[BLOGSUBHEADING]Section 1[/BLOGSUBHEADING]
[BLOG]This is the full text of section 1 of my blog[/BLOG]
[BLOGSUBHEADING]Section 2[/BLOGSUBHEADING]
[BLOG]This is the full text of section 2 of my blog[/BLOG]

Each BLOG /BLOG pair wouldbe displayed as a "Read more ..." as above in the Spoiler example button but Titles, intros and section headings would be displayed.

Each of these tags would have a font style, colour etc. associated with it as the default (obviously they could be overridden easily within the text body in the usual way).

jgpaiva · « **Reply #36 on:** May 21, 2006, 03:08 PM »

eheh... As always, i missunderstood stuff.
I thought you had mentioned that the forum would make a blog entry from a post. I mean, every post that had the [blog] tag would be copied to the blog.

I mean, each blog entry would also be a post on the forum.
I completelly misunderstood the idea :S

I also like the idea carol presented in her last post, having the (read more) button that would disappear and show the whole post (on the blog)

mouser · « **Reply #37 on:** May 21, 2006, 03:12 PM »

i think a spoiler like button that says read more instantly makes a lot of sense.

each blog entry WILL be a post on the forum,
but users wont just be able to put a [blog] tag in their post to make that happen.
only a moderator will be able to be able to promote a post to a blog/frontpage entry.
and only a moderator will have final say about what introductory text from the post should go on the blog page.

Carol Haynes · « **Reply #38 on:** May 21, 2006, 03:45 PM »

I can't see a problem with letting people use the blog tags in their own posts, or edit them accordingly at the request of a mod.

Once a post is considered suitable and edited into a consistent format it could be promoted to full blog status and would have an intro on the blogg main page.

If someone wants to write a significant piece outside the normal forum it could submitted in a separate forum section.

A simple way to acheive the blog main page would be to use something like eg. WordPress (or similar Blog) to act as a dumb frontend for the blog posts. It would then only need moderators (or whoever else you want to invlove) to have access to the frontend to copy summaried to Wordpress and add a link to the main SMF forum post where the blog is stored. That way it wouldn't require any sort of integration of Wordpress with SMF, just use WordPress as a quick way to get a frontpage up that is easy to use.

You could of course use any Blog type setup to acheive this, WordPress is just an example and maybe an overkill.

You could even use the "Blogger" website and have an extra point of entry into DonationCoder.com and then there would be no setting up work to do!

jgpaiva · « **Reply #39 on:** May 21, 2006, 05:46 PM »

That means that a user would put the [blog] tag on his post, but it might not get blogged?
I think i still don't get the idea...
Ok, this was non-sense, i misread it all. I think now i understand the idea, please proceed with the brain-storming

mouser · « **Reply #40 on:** June 11, 2006, 02:18 PM »

there must be a php coder here who is interested in a medium scale serious project like this?

Rover · « **Reply #41 on:** June 12, 2006, 11:29 PM »

Conceptually, this is just a PHP wrapper around a directory structure, right? The pain in the neck about writing a CMS is the User Interface stuff. (At least to me it is)

From what I recall, you're proposing something like this:

A directory structure.....
/www/dc.com/html/mainsite/pages of stuff
/www/dc.com/html/non-published/pages of stuff
/www/dc.com/html/includes/ header, footer, css, images, etc.
/www/dc.com/html/admin/ admin programs to promote content, preview it, etc.

with a control php script to read and display requested pages, but not unpublished or removed pages. Something like:
/www/dc.com/html/pager.php?page=/reviews/av-2006-04-01.php
That would read all of the mainsite directories and pages to create a link panel plus display the requested page. Is that about right?

If you can live without WYSIWYG page creation, this should not be incredibly difficult....for someone else

Seriously, is this the concept?

mouser · « **Reply #42 on:** June 13, 2006, 07:19 AM »

this is very close to the concept, and you've grasped the main idea.

to be more specific, the idea is to have:
1) a Content Directory Tree, which is someplace not in public_html
2) a set of Template and Site Building instructions, again not in public_html
3) a tool for BUILDING (regenerating) the html site from the content+templates

so it wouldnt be a dynamically generated "wrapper" but rather a way of building static html (or php) pages on demand when they need updating, from a set of content pages and templates.

so for example if you changed the header/banner, you could say "rebuild the entire website now" and it would rebuild all the static pages with the new header, footer, etc.

in more advanced cases, you could say, this page should contain the text of these posts; so when one of these posts change, this page needs to be rebuilt. so there has to be a kind of table telling it what needs rebuilding and when.

the tool also needs to provide some nice functions for things like a navigation bar/menu (which means it has to scan the directories and discover the tree structure of the site from the content directory, and then make this into a nice menu system). but yes the key idea is that the content directory tree IS the site layout.

the advantages are:
the final result is superfast static pages.
the content pages are all outside the public_html directory and can be made safe (ie you can dissallow php,etc), which means its easy to give random people ftp access to "their section" of content.
it lets you write page content easily by hand in flat files
it still allows for the possibility of a more sophisticated wsywig/gui/usermanagement cms front end to be layered on top, creating content pages in the content directory (as you mention above), thought this is not my immediate concern.

webrunner · « **Reply #43 on:** June 15, 2006, 05:51 PM »

Excuse me, but why not choose a standard CMS in stead of reinventing the wheel?
I am currently looking into CmsMadeSimple, wich is very nice and has great features.

mouser · « **Reply #44 on:** June 15, 2006, 06:43 PM »

i've looked at CmsMadeSimple, and nearly every cms i can find.. so many my head is spinning.

i've tried hard to find an existing cms that i thought would work for us, and have come to the conclusion that the best thing is for us to design our own mini one.

some primary things that rule out most cms:
1) we want it tightly integrated with the forum login info
2) we want it to use flat files
3) we want the generated pages to be pure html and not make the entire site a php based dynamic page generation thing (almost every cms on planet fails here; only moveabletype adopts this rebuilding of static pages approach). this is desired to reduce cpu load.
4) our expectation is that most of the articles and posts and blogs will be generated from actual forum posts - so that demands a custom approach.

it's been a real struggle trying to figure out the tradeoffs between using an existing cms and embarking on our own. i don't take such a decision lightly and i would rather find one existing one that suits us - but in this case i don't think we need a lot of the heavy cms stuff and i think the existing cms systems don't quite match our needs so.. i think its a custom one for us..

mouser · « **Reply #45 on:** July 02, 2006, 04:22 AM »

nice discussion of push+pull cms strategies:
http://www.gadgetopia.com/post/5385

Rover · « **Reply #46 on:** July 08, 2006, 03:00 AM »

@Mouser - Can you (or one of your minions) mock up a user interface for this?

The actual make-the-site-from-the-templates-and-content part of this seems pretty straight forward. The tricky bits will be what you expect users to see and do. I think it would be beneficial to mock up a few parts of the UI for a couple of reasons:
1) It would help us define some of the details
2) It might help us group some components and distribute them among developers.

mouser · « **Reply #47 on:** July 08, 2006, 03:34 AM »

yeah i can try.

jeremejazz · « **Reply #48 on:** October 18, 2010, 12:04 PM »

cool

I hope I could join you.. I just need to catch up with PHP's features ...

Deozaan · « **Reply #49 on:** October 18, 2010, 05:09 PM »

Hi Jereme, and anyone else wondering: This thread died off 4 years ago in 2006. Be sure to look at the dates of posts to see if they're still relevant.