I'm new to orchard development and spent the last week studying it. I'm having a hard time in understanding some concepts, such as placement.info files.
I've read the article Understanding placement info from the project site and the section from the book "Orchard up and running" related to it.
What I understand:
Placement info files work on the content item level. It is used to reorder the rendering of the fields and content parts;
This file has three main tags: placement (basically a wrapper), match(which defines if the rules will be applied to the summary or detail display) and place (which effectively defines the placement rules);
What I don't understand:
How do I define the order of the tags? In the "place" tags I see "Content:Before", "Content:After.7", "Content:2.9" and some other rules. What does it mean to define "Place Parts_Tags_ShowTags="Header:after.7"/"? Is the placement file capable of moving parts to different zones?
I'm getting a bit frustrated using it. I don't know if I'm not using the right material (they seem very brief and/or outdated). If so, could someone suggest me some links?
I'd really appreciate some help, guys..
Thanks in advance
The name of the attribute is the shape name (usually as returned by a part driver), and the value is where to send that shape. It is a zone name, followed by a colon, and then ordering. The zone name can start with a slash if you want to target a top-level zone (those are defined in the Layout.cshtml file), like this: /AsideSecond:1. The ordering can be a special number, or a dotted sequence. For example, 1.1 comes after 1 but before 2. 1.1.1 would come after 1.1 and before 1.2, etc. after and before can also be used to send a shape after or before everything else.
I hope this helps.
Related
One of my colleague left on vacation and left me with an Orchard project to work on.
I never worked with Orchard, so please excuse my ignorance and my possibly stupid questions.
I come to you for general advice on how to implement and structure the content of my site, as my research didn't give me the answers I'm looking for.
Here are the requirements:
The site must be divided into sections (section A, section A-1, section A-2, section B, etc...)
The navigation of the site must be based on the sections, each navigation item must also contain an image
Each section has a separate page with roughly 4 types of content that must be displayed:
Title of the page
Articles associated with this section, which represent the main content
FAQ content associated with the section which should be displayed in a specific zone
Miscellaneous content associated with the section which should also be displayed in a specific zone
I'm struggling at nearly every aspect of the requirements...
We started building a taxonomy, with as many terms as we have sections, allowing us to build the hierarchy we want, which is perfect. But this had 2 downsides:
The built-in taxonomy-based navigation is static, so the only thing displayed is the term, and we couldn't find a way to change it so the user would be able to add an image to the taxonomy term.
The generated pages based on the taxonomy display every content item based on the current term, that is, the articles, but also the FAQ content and the miscellaneous content, all in the Content zone.
Is there any way to work around these issues by using the built-in taxonomy? Or will I have to build content types from scratch in order to achieve what I'm trying?
The solution my colleague came up with was to add a layer for each section, and add in this layer 3 widgets, one for each specific content (title, FAQ, misc) in different zones. But I don't think this will me maintainable, as we currently have 4 main sections, each with 4-5 subsections, so that's rougly 60 layers, which will be a nightmare for the client to maintain.
Any advice will be greatly appreciated, I'm kind of lost.
Thanks in advance,
Mickaël
Taxonomies was a good start, but now you need to study projections. You'll be able to set-up filters about what you display.
For adding an image to your terms, one way to do it is to add a media library picker field to the type that was created for your taxonomy.
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 have a batch class (KC8) which is using page/form recognition and separator zones ("Page 1 of" = separator value). It seems like about 50% of the time it will improperly separate the documents, with some not even getting the correct form type, and others breaking off pages 1, 2 and 3 and 4 into 3 separate documents when they should only be one. Of course all of this gets to the Quality Control queue, but when you unreject them they seem to process and release with no problems. Why is this happening? Shouldn't they continuously fail to be recognized and separated properly if they failed the first time? Does anyone have any similar experience or advice for fixing it? Please ask any questions you need to clarify the details of the batch class if you need it.
Thanks,
Matt
I solved the separation issue. Part of the problem was a form id zone located in a place on the form that moved around depending on how much information was entered into one of the fields near the top of the page. Obviously pages like that would not be recognized. I picked a different recognition zone (company logo + text image) that did not move around and everything is fine now.
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.