I’m new to Modx so I don’t know if this is possible or not.
My TV, in this case [[*myTV]] outputs the following:
<data value='www.mylink.com'>Description</data>
Is there a way to only display the data value in the front-end? In this case I just want to display the url.
My recommendation would be to keep the data (in this case the URL) and the html separate, and that might help your situation. If the TV only includes the URL itself, then it makes it much easier to deal with the output of the TV using output modifiers. As an example, if [[*myTV]] contains www.mylink.com for a particular resource and you want the original output in your question, you could do something like:
[[*myTV:default=`<data value='[[*myTV]]'>Description</data>`]]
You can also nest TVs within output modifiers, so if for example you had a corresponding [[*description]] TV that describes the URL in [[*myTV]], you could use:
[[*myTV:default=`<data value='[[*myTV]]'>[[*description]]</data>`]]
TL;DR... The short version: Storing the entire output in the TV and extracting text from within that TV to output is much more difficult than storing individual components of that output in separate TVs and bringing them together for output when needed.
The longer version: In any situation where you're storing both data and HTML in a TV (which is not advisable in the vast majority of cases), you'll likely find duplication of your data across your project, and if by chance you decide to change the html at some point in the future, you then have to go into each and every TV field and change that HTML, which is the opposite effect from what a CMS is supposed to do - i.e. make Content Management easier!
If you do happen to find a use case for storing TVs along with their HTML formatting, that is a job best left for MODX Chunks, where you can code the implementation of your TVs within HTML in one spot within MODX and instead of duplicating that code everywhere, you reference the chunk like so: [[$chunk]].
Related
I'm relatively new to Expression Engine, and as I'm learning it I am seeing some stuff missing that WordPress has had for a while. A big one for me is shortcodes, since I will use these to allow CMS users to place more complex content in place with their other content.
I'm not seeing any real equivalent to this in EE, apart from a forthcoming plugin that's in private beta.
As an initial test I'm attempting to fake shortcodes by using delimited strings (e.g. #foo#) in the content field, then using a regex to pull those out and pass them to a function that can retrieve the content out of EE's database.
This brings me to a second question, which is that in looking at EE's API docs, there doesn't appear to be a simple means of retrieving the channel entries programmatically (thinking of something akin to WP's built-in get_posts function).
So my questions are:
a) Can this be done?
b) If so, is my method of approaching it reasonable? Or is there something stupidly obvious I'm missing in my approach?
To reiterate, my main objective here is to have some means of allowing people managing content to drop a code in place in their content that will be replaced with channel content.
Thanks for any advice or help you can give me.
Here's a simple example of the functionality you're looking for.
1) Start by installing Low Replace.
2) Create two Global Variables called gv_hello and gv_goodbye with the values "Hello" and "Goodbye" respectively.
3) Put this text into the body of an entry:
[say_hello]
Nice to see you.
[say_goodbye]
4) Put this into your template, wrapping the Low Replace tag around your body field.
{exp:low_replace
find="[say_hello]|[say_goodbye]"
replace="{gv_hello}|{gv_goodbye}"
multiple="yes"
}
{body}
{/exp:low_replace}
5) It should output this into your browser:
Hello
Nice to see you.
Goodbye
Obviously, this is a really simple example. You can put full blown HTML into your global variable. For example, we've used that to render a complex, interactive graphic that isn't editable but can be easily dropped into a page by any editor.
Unfortunately, due to parse order issues, EE tags won't work inside Global Variables. If you need EE tags in your short code output, you'll need to use Low Variables addon instead of Global Variables.
Continued from the comment:
Do you have examples of the kind of shortcodes you want to support/include? Because i have doubts if controlling the page-layout from a text-field or wysiwyg-field is the way to go.
If you want editors to be able to adjust layout or show/hide extra parts on the page, giving them access to some extra fields in the channel, is (imo) much more manageable and future-proof. For instance some selectfields, a relationship (or playa) field, or a matrix, to let them choose which parts to include/exclude on a page, or which entry from another channel to pull content from.
As said in the comment: i totally understand if you want to replace some #foo# tags with images or data from another field (see other answers: nsm-transplant, low_replace). But, giving an editor access to shortcodes and picking them out, is like writing a template-engine to generate ee-template code for the ee-template-engine.
Using some custom fields to let editors pick and choose parts to embed is, i think, much more manageable.
That being said, you could make a plugin to parse the shortcodes from a textareas content, and then program a lot, to fetch data from other modules you want to support. For channel entries you could build out of the channel data library by objectiveHTML. https://github.com/objectivehtml/Channel-Data
I hear you, I too miss shortcodes from WP -- though the reason they work so easily there is the ubiquity of the_content(). With the great flexibility of EE comes fewer blanket solutions.
I'd suggest looking at NSM Transplant. It should fit the bill for you.
There is also a plugin called Shortcode, which you can find here at
Devot-ee
A quote from the page:
Shortcode aims to allow for more dynamic use of content by authors and
editors, allowing for injection of reusable bits of content or even
whole pieces of functionality into any field in EE
I need to divide long content to sub-pages.
Rule for dividing: Heading1 (H1)
Cms-system: MODX Evolution
As far as i know, there is nothing in modx to use for this kind of problem.
I probably got to do this manually anyway, but i still would like to know if there is a way to do this in MODX Evo / Revo.
Edit:
I need to do this in MODX; sub-pages got to be actual subpages, and original page becomes to container.
Navigation will be done with wayfinder.
Edit2:
All done.. manually. Question still open, though.
This is not possible out of the box and I don't know of any extra that archieves what you want. You would have to write a plugin that acts everytime you save a resource and split up the content, create/delete sibling resources as needed etc. Sounds like a lot of work for what you want to archieve to me.
I suppose you have a look at the MIGX extra. It provides you with a TV with the possibility to store an indefinite amount of distinct TV content sets. Have a look at the documentation and Mark Hamstra's tutorial (with screenshots) to see how it is done. You should define one MIGX entry to consist of a text field for the <h1> and a rich text field for the content of the "subpage".
Afterwards, you can use form customization to hide the original content field and display your MIGX Tv instead.
I think, this is a much easier way to archieve, what you want, and can't think of any way, where you would benefit from actual subpages.
Edit: Sorry, I just recognized that you were asking about Evolution, not Revolution. My solution would work in Revo, but I don't think there's something like MIGX for Evo. Sorry, my mistake.
not 'out of the box' you will have to run your content through a snippet to parse it into separate divs or something that you can run some javascript on to possibly 'tab' the content.
If you need to show the 'subpages' in your navigation, you will probably have to use the gatResources extra to parse your content ~ which will be very expensive on resource usage.
You can (depending on how you're using the tree) just create actual sub resources under the parent resource, using Ditto or Wayfinder to build navigation for it.
If you can't use the tree like that (though from your description I think you can), you could also set up a number of template variables ("content1", "content2", "content3" etc) and show that with a simple snippet or so.
I want to add text to body element but I don't know how. Which method will work on the body tag?
Sorry for my english and thanks for replies.
In Watir, you can manipulate a web page (DOM) using JS, just like that:
browser.execute_script("document.getElementById('pageContent').appendChild(document.createTextNode('Great Success!'));")
I assume that the point of the question is:
All users are not just interacting by just clicking buttons and links on the web app, some of them are doing nasty things like altering http requests to make your system do something that it is not supposed to do... or to just have some fun.
To mimic this behavior, you could write a ui-test that alters forms on the web page, so that for example, one could type in anything into any field instead of a limited dropdown.
To do that, ui test has to:
manipulate DOM to set form inputs free of limitations (replace select's with input's, etc.)
ui test has to know, which values to use, in many cases it's pointless to enter random values. Your webapp has to provide some good "unwanted" options.
Why would you want to modify the webpage in Watir? It's for automated testing, not DOM manipulation.
If you want to add something to the DOM element in javascript, you can do it like that:
var txt = document.createTextNode(" This text was added to the DIV.");
document.getElementById('myDiv').appendChild(txt);
Or use some DOM manipulation library, like jQuery.
If you have not worked your way though the watir tutorial, I would suggest you do so. It deals with things like filling in text fields etc.
Learn to use the developer tools for your browser, Firebug for Firefox, or the built in tools for IE and CHrome. They will let you look at things as you interact with the site.
If the element is not a normal HTML input field of some sort, then you are dealing with a custom control. Many exist and they are varied and there is no one set solution for dealing with them. Without knowing which control you are using, and being able ourselves to interact with a sample of it, or at least see the HTML, it is very very difficult to advise you, we basically have to just guess (which is often a waste of everyone's time)
Odds are if you have a place you can enter text, then it is some form of input control, it might not start out that way, you may need to click on some other element, to make the input area appear, but without a sample of HTML all we can do is guess.
If this is a commercial control, see if you can find a demo site that shows the control in action. Try googling things like class names for the elements and often you get lucky
I know i can use
<mt:EntryAssets lastn="1">
<img src="<$mt:AssetThumbnailURL width="100"$>" />
</mt:EntryAssets>
to show the 'last' asset...how do I show the 'first' or 'oldest' assest?
[I'll point out here that "first" and "oldest" are not necessarily the same question.
You'll see why this is important below. Given the snippet you used, I'm going to assume what you're asking for is first as in position within the entry content. Sorry for length, but this is one of my pet bugs.]
Technically, you can't. That bug(summarized further down if you don't have an Fbz account) has finally been attached to a milestone, so hopefully this won't always be the case.
Practically, reversing the sort order will usually probably output what you expect:
<mt:entryassets limit="1" sort_order="ascend">
...as long as you compose your entries top-to-bottom, and don't later mess with the assets much
The underlying problem is that the current EntryAssets implementation doesn't actually take your content into account. It just loads a list of associated assets and then sorts them by the created_on dates of the assets themselves, not what physical order they appear in or even when they were attached to that particular entry. So as an extreme example, if you insert five images into a post, my snippet above will return the first image, as expected. If you later reverse their order and save, it'll still output that same image, which is now the (ordinal) last one. So, back to what I said at top, you're thinking "first" and MT is always giving you "oldest." And this requires an even further assumption that you're always uploading the assets at time of composition. If one of them was already in the system from say, two years ago, it's going to get returned because it's just older than everything else.
If you're using MT4.3x with the Entry Asset Manager in the sidebar of the composition screen and use it to attach(rather than insert) assets, this is going to get even more complicated, because there's no way to distinguish between assets that were associated with the entry via each manner.
So.
If you absolutely need the returned asset to be predictable, you'll need to actually distinguish it from the group in some way. There's this suggestion to tag the asset with "#first" or something similar. It's not great, but you'll at least know what you're getting(assuming you only tag one asset per entry as such). If you've got custom fields available, you might see if it makes more sense to create a separate "featured/thumbnail image" asset field that it would go into so that you could explicitly test for it. It'll ultimately depend some upon why you're wanting to extract this particular asset.
When do you call Microsoft.Security.Application.AntiXss.HtmlEncode? Do you do it when the user submits the information or do you do when you're displaying the information?
How about for basic stuff like First Name, Last Name, City, State, Zip?
You do it when you are displaying the information. Preserve the original as it was entered, convert it for display on a web page. Let's say you were displaying it in some other way, like exporting it into Excel. In that case, you'd want to export the preserved original.
Encode every single string.
You should only encode or escape your data at the last possible moment, whether that's directly before you put it in the database, or display it on the screen. If you encode too soon, you run the risk of accidentally double encoding (you'll often see & on newbies' websites - myself included).
If you do want to encode sooner than that, then take measures to avoid the double encoding. Joel wrote an article about good uses for hungarian notation, where he advocated use of prefixes to determine what is stored in the variable. eg: "us" for unsafe string, "ss" for safe string.
usFirstName = getUserInput('firstName')
ssFirstName = cleanString(usFirstName);
Also note that it doesn't matter what the type of information is (city, zip code, etc) - leaving any of these unchecked is asking for trouble.
It depends on your situation. Where I work, for years the company did no HTML encoding, so when we started doing it, it would have been almost impossible to find every location within the system that user input could be displayed on the page.
Instead we chose to sanitize input on its way into the system since there were fewer input points than output points. We sanitize immediately before inputting data into the DB, although we don't use Microsoft's AntiXss library, we use a set of homebrew methods that whitelist ranges of HTML tags and characters depending on the type of input.
If you're designing the system from scratch, or you have a system that is small (or managed well) enough to encode output, follow Corey's suggestion. It's definitely the better way to do it.
Encoding is not a property of the data, it is a property of the transport mechanism. Therefore you should unencode data when you receive it, and encode it appropriately before transmission. The transport mechanism determines what sort of encoding is necessary.
This principle holds true whether your transport mechanism is HTML, HTTP, smoke signals, etc. The trick is knowing how to do the types of encoding manually, and when various frameworks do the steps for you automagically. For instance, ASP.NET will encode data assigned to a System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button's Text, but not text assigned to a System.Web.UI.WebControls.Literal's Text. jQuery will encode content you set with .innerText(), but not content you set with .innerHtml().