’Build a CMS in CodeIgniter’ tutsplus - Create a contact page or a gallery page

[eluser]Otemu[/eluser]
Hi,

Building a cms can be quite complicated and so much can be involved, I would try and make it simple as possible or if you can use an already built solution.

Well I guess you have also viewed this tutorial.

Actually no I never looked at the tutorial, but I have worked with several different cms, also currently developing a simple custom cms. Most cms function with different template layouts within the cms.

The main idea is that all pages are dynamic-cms pages as you said, so the navbar at the front end is also dynamic

I find working with a cms navigation that is generated from its top level nodes and sub nodes automatically can be a bit inflexible at times, I find a custom generated cms menu more flexible, so within your cms a user could select any article/page or create a custom link for top level navigation and sub levels, the navigation will be then be generated from that custom list. If however you don't need that flexibility then auto generated is sufficient.

The contact page as cms page is somthing that I can’t figure out exactly how it should be done. In the admin panel (in the tutorial) there’s a form that creates all pages with title, template, slug, body etc so the contact form would normally placed in the body-textarea. I could switch the wysiwyg editor to html and add the html code there, but this is not something that you would do in a real project, as most common users don’t know coding. Even though I’m still in planning I have also not figured out how the “contact template” solution should be exactly working.

In most real world situations the cms wouldn't handle the contact us page, this would be something that would be custom built by the developers and the users would just have control over the text, you do have some cms that have form builders to handle various forms but I doubt your looking for that kind of level of functionality, if you are I explain how you can include that. You could do the contact page completely in the wysiwyg as you said above or you could create a custom view, with the form fields, when loading the page you check what template to use, if it using contact template then load that custom view and any text you need from the cms. Another option is to use macro style like umbraco does, where developers can build custom macro(modules) features for the user and then these custom functionality can simply be dropped in any of your pages.

Well if I go with cms pages I think I’ll have to change the admin panel a little bit, so I guess I should have something like tabs, where in first tab I should have the main settings of the page (title, template, slug, body) and in second tab the media management, right? Else in case of fixed pages I could put the galleries in a seperate section of the admin panel.

Have you looked at available cms, such as Joomla, Drupal, Umbraco etc? This will give you a good example of how cms are structured and work, then you could take certain aspects from them to build the cms how you want, there are online demos for joomla here http://demo.joomla.org/ and other cms have online demos too.

Normally media manager is a completely separate section in cms, which is purely for media management, with the tabs to add media would normally just be a button like add media or attach media.

You could create a custom gallery and contact controller, with custom views, if you need data from the cms for those pages, then these custom controllers can handle that, for instance the custom contact controller, would check if there is a page within your cms called contact, then load that data and add any other things that you have specified in your custom view, this way you keep the cms generic, as am sure you don't want to get in the habit of creating a new cms section for every time you need a new layout.