Advice on a CMS

[eluser]meigwilym[/eluser]
Hi all,

I'll soon be building my first custom CMS with CI. Before I start I thought I'd ask the community for your advice on a few things. I don't want anyone to do any coding for me, I just want some pointers.

First of all, the CMS will be bilingual - does anyone have any experience of this?

How do I integrate a WYSIWYG editor into a page? I also need to inculde user's images in the text.

I want a simple system for admin logging in/out - what are your recommendations? Sentry? Erkana? There will probably be only 1-2 admins so this does not need a fully fledged user management system.

Thanks for your help.

Mei

[eluser]Jamie Rumbelow[/eluser]
In terms of different languages, if it requires UTF-8 support (different character sets) then its reasonably easy. Just instead of outputting text in views, use the $this->lang library. Then you just have to specify what the text is in a language file.

Example:

Code:

<h1>&lt;?=$this->lang->line("site_header")?&gt;</h1>

Its really easy.

Secondly, there are some plugins/helpers/libraries which do this, although i dont think it would be to hard.

Finally, I definatly recommend Erkana, its brilliantly easy and lets you specify custom login conditions.

If you need any help dont hesitate to PM me

Regards,
James

[eluser]esra[/eluser]
Are you speaking about switching between multiple languages or displaying multiple languages (Multilinguism as in the W3C's M17n recommendation) simultaneously? CI handles the former, but doing the latter is going to require some work. Displaying content in multiple languages simultaneously is less a problem in 1.6.x than the earlier versions.

To my knowledge, there are plugins or helpers available supporting TinyMCE, FCKEditor and Spaw. There are probably more. A lot of CI plugins and helpers are discussed on blogs throughout the net, so you might want to do some searches once you decide about which editor to use. If you want the ability to use multiple editors at different points throughout the CMS, this should be possible using Khaos Event Manager which operates similar to Joomla's plugin API.

[eluser]meigwilym[/eluser]
Thanks for your help guys.

The system would switch between two languages. I hadn't really thought about the lang library, but it looks like a great idea.

I've been thinking about a way to offer multiple translations of a page. In the editor, you would choose the page to be translated, and the language, which would then be stored in a table (with 'original_article_id' and 'lang' as fields).

Is this viable, or are there better ways of doing it?

Thanks again,

Mei

[eluser]Tom Glover[/eluser]
this is viable but there may be a better way of doing it that would require more complication, but would then simplify the user experience.

[eluser]gon[/eluser]
In our CMS, we use FCKEditor for WYSIWYG editing.

And we do just what you say for supporting different languages. We put a language select that will load the content when changed (you can even use AJAX and change the FCKeditor contents without reloading the page).
And when the user saves, data is stored with its language as a column.

For showing data, you can use a helper that will get content from database, passing it the content name and the language.
But it's more efficient to do a single query for getting all the content at the controller.