Dynamic segment_1 in Expression Engine - expressionengine

This is a pretty simple question, I just can't seem to find the information on it. In expression engine, is it possible for {segment_1} to be a dynamic variable. I.E. if I wanted to take my URL structure from:
http://www.whatever.com/category/football/green-bay/
to:
http://www.whatever.com/football/green-bay/
I don't want to actually create the directory for football within my code(as this is just an example, and the amount of base categories is in the hundreds), I just want it to map to my templates/category page.
I know this could probably be accomplished somehow through mod_rewrite, but that's what I'm trying to avoid. I'm trying to see if there's a built in way in Expression Engine to accomplish this.

This sounds like the sort of functionality that the MD Detect Pagetype plugin offers. The plugin "listens" to a certain URL segment to determine what type of page is being displayed. It then gives you access to the following conditionals:
{exp:md_detect_page_type url_segment="{segment_3}"}
{if pagination_page}This is a Paginated Page{/if}
{if category_page}This is a Category Page{/if}
{if yearly_archive_page}This is a Yearly Archive Page{/if}
{/exp:md_detect_page_type}
Visit the website linked above to download and find out more about the free plugin.

Related

Drupal how to add a search filter to admin content page

I've never used Drupal before (development or managing content). I was asked to extend the admin content page to have a filter and simply don't know enough to get moving quickly.
Can anyone tell me if adding a search by text filter in the admin content area requires code or is there a CMS feature like adding a node for this task.
If code is required, is there something like a hook for this area? Not sure where to start. I will be investigating on my own but pointers to get me oriented to Drupal would help.
By default Drupal provides search mechanism ready to use. But there are also additional module which can improve search experience. You don't need any coding to use that search. You already have search form block ready to use.
Go to Structure -> Blocks and find block called "Search form". Now all you have to do is to put that block in some region and it will appear on front-end. Of course if it's not already styled by your theme it may be needed to put some extra CSS to make it look nice. There are also some template files which you can override and put some your HTML if you need.
There's also template file for search results page (which of course will work out of box also).
You may also need to create new block region if you want to place your form at some specific place, not covered by any existing region defined by your theme (easy thing to do!).
See https://drupal.stackexchange.com/q/30633/101329, the "Admin Views" module lets you configure the search form as you like.

Searching Single Pages with Dynamic Content

I have a slight problem I have been trying to address for a client I have been working with. We have 4 sets of single pages that are loading content from a database using PHP based upon a get string that is provided. These pages that are generated are optimized well for SEO and have alt tags for images and Content that we need to be able to search using a search feature.
Now i had assumed (An everyone knows what assuming gets you) that these pages by default would be able to be searched by the concrete 5 built in search feature. But it doesn't work. If I search for a word that I know is definitely on one of these pages even multiple times no results are found.
How can I make Concrete5 search these pages. If its no do able by a default or by a plugin, then can someone please offer some advice on how to fix this. This is an important feature and must be completed.
EDIT: See my comment below. I still need some help or direction here as CSE inst much of an option.
EDIT2: It may be viable for me to install a crawler and a custom search engine to address my problems. I was thinking of spider. Any other suggestions on that or other options are much appreciated!
Unfortunately C5 doesn't provide a way to do this -- the only way to tap into the search index is with blocks. And even if you created a phony block just to pass content from the single_page through to the search index, there's no way to say that some content is from one URL while other content is from another URL (which you'd need to do since your single_page controller is handling many different URL's).
I don't know of a way to achieve what you want to do (and it appears that nobody else does either -- http://www.concrete5.org/community/forums/customizing_c5/make-content-in-single-pages-searchable/ ), other than building your own internal search engine.
EDIT: I just did some digging, and thought that perhaps you could manually insert records into the PageSearchIndex table and specify the searchable content and the desired path there -- but this won't work because it relies on one cID (collection id, a.k.a. page id) per entry -- so you'd only be able to insert one record for the top-level single_page path.
I think the simplest solution here would be to create your own searching infrastructure for your single_pages (like some kind of function in the controller that would return an array of page paths and searchable content for each one), then override the search block and perform an additional search of your single_page -- then combine the results on the search results page there. Or just use google site search for your site, which will actually crawl the pages and hence find your various single_page urls: https://www.google.com/cse/
Best of luck.
I have not tested this, but maybe you can put a function getSearchableContent() in the single pages controller like you do for blocks. This would return the string to be searched. Would look something like this:
function getSearchableContent() {
// ... compose searchstring depending on the queried content.
return $searchstring;
}
But I don't know if this works for dynamic content. If not, I'd look into C5's search index core classes and try to extend them for your project.

Modx - Extend site_content - Add new table

Currently, we're running revolution 2.2. On site_content, we have some tags that are ran for crawling twitter. I want to start tracking the number of results for each tag as results come in, to determine which tags don't return that many results, etc.
So I was thinking that I should create a new table (twitter_data), and have a foreign key that will link it to the search tag ID, which is stored in site_content.
What is the best path to accomplish this? Should I create my table then run the reverse schema tool, outlined here?
http://rtfm.modx.com/display/revolution20/Reverse+Engineer+xPDO+Classes+from+Existing+Database+Table#ReverseEngineerxPDOClassesfromExistingDatabaseTable-CreatingaMySQLtable
I also found this, but not sure if this is what I should be looking into:
http://rtfm.modx.com/display/revolution20/Using+Custom+Database+Tables+in+your+3rd+Party+Components
Probably not - if you can avoid modifying the core modx schema do so. an external table may be your best option, but requires a fair bit of work.
though if you can explain wht you mean by 'tags' a little better [html tags? snippets? content tags? not sure what you mean] there may be other options. for example. one of our clients wanted to count page hits [and didn't want to use google to do it] so all we did was to create a template variable bound to each page they wanted to count and then updated that appropriate variable by writing plugin to fire on the onpageload or onpagerender event. [I don't ermember exactly which or what it was called]
Basically, you may be able to do this by writng a plugin rather than trying to extend anything or add snippets/chunks.

Any way in Expression Engine to simulate Wordpress' shortcode functionality?

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

Dividing long content to subpages

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.

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