CMS Made Simple

Beginner’s Guide to CMS Made Simple 1.6

As a web developer I use a variety of Content Management Systems (CMS), either a bespoke solution I develop myself or more commonly an off the shelf (normally) Open Source platform.

I’ve been using the excellent CMS Made Simple for a couple of years now with great results (don’t let the “simple” in the name fool you, this is a feature-rich application) so when I was asked if I would like to review a copy of CMS Made Simple 1.6: Beginner’s Guide by Sofia Hauschildt I jumped at the chance.

Embarrassingly, I’ve had this copy of the book sitting by my desk for a couple of months but have been so busy with work I’ve not had the chance to flick past the first few pages.  However, now I’ve got some new CMSMS projects in the pipeline I’m looking forward to getting into the book and seeing what it can offer. Read More…

CMS Made Simple WYSIWYG table outlines

CMS Made Simple is a great content management system.  It’s free, easy to get to grips with, quite powerful and the forums are fairly helpful when you need help.

There are obviously quirks with it (as there is with all off the shelf software) such as tables inserted within the WYSIWYG editor lacking any outlines, making placement quite problematic (think “invisible table”).

Thankfully there is an answer with at least the current versions of CMS Made Simple (1.4.1 at the time of writing this) having an option to turn table outline borders on and off.

Method

From within the CMS Made Simple admin control panel, go to: Extensions > TinyMCE WYSIWYG > Advanced (tab)

There you should see a checkbox for the option “Include only screen CSS”.  Tick that, update the settings and give the WYSIWYG editor a whirl.

If all has gone well, you should now see the outline borders when editing page contents.

Page redirect with CMS Made Simple

If you’re scratching your head on how to get an HTTP redirect with CMS Made Simple, then save your scalp and scratch no longer!

All you need to do is create a User Defined Tag (UDT) within your CMS MS admin (Extensions > User Defined Tags), call the tag “redirect” and paste the following code:

if( isset( $params['to'] ) )
  {
    global $gCms;
    $manager =& $gCms->GetHierarchyManager();
    $node =& $manager->sureGetNodeByAlias($params['to']);
    $content =& $node->GetContent();
    if (isset($content) && is_object($content))
       {
         if ($content->GetURL() != '')
         {
            redirect($content->GetURL());
         }
       }
    else return '<!-- redirect udt - page not found: '.$params['to'].' -->';
  }

To use, add {redirect to=”page_alias”} into one of your pages, or somewhere intelligently placed in your template.  If it’s going into a template then you should have an if statement around this, or you’ll get some nasty redirection loops!

Credit to calguy1000 for writing the function.

Further reading:

Update

I don’t know if they have always been there but I’ve since noticed the CMS Made Simple tags redirect_url and redirect_page

To use, insert into your page or template:

{redirect_page page="some-page-alias"}

or

{redirect_url to="www.cmsmadesimple.org"}

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