I know this sounds crazy, but I need to show some post information outside of the loop in the expression engine channel module. Is this possible?
You could use EE's SQL Query template tags (if you know, or have access to the database table names and know what to look for in the database):
http://expressionengine.com/user_guide/modules/query/index.html
Basically, you'd output only what you need - it doesn't have to belong to a channel, or anything specific. The one kicker is that you'd have to know the basics of SQL syntax, but if you have a small working knowledge of it, you can do tons of additional things with it.
If you're not keen on SQL, you could simply embed a template within the template that you're working on. Here's a simple example that assumes you're editing the index and meta templates inside of a template group called 'news':
index template contents:
{exp:channel:entries channel="news"}
<div class="entry">
<h1>{title}</h1>
<div class="content">{body}</div>
{embed="news/meta" this_entry_id="{entry_id}"}
</div>
{/exp:channel:entries}
meta template contents:
{exp:channel:entries channel="news" dynamic="no" limit="1" entry_id="{embed:this_entry_id}"}
<div class="meta">
<p>{entry_date}</p>
<p>{author}</p>
</div>
{/exp:channel:entries}
As you can see, the index template is embedding the meta template. Note that we're passing a parameter to the meta template so that it knows which entry ID to print information about. If you're unfamiliar with EE's template embedding feature, you can read more about it in the EE docs. Embedding templates in other templates is a great way to access the {exp:channel:entries} loop multiple times.
There's an add-on called MX Jumper that allows you to "set" a variable from inside your entries loop and then "get" it elsewhere in the template (before or after in the HTML loop doesn't matter because it parses later).
Alternatively, the approach that's all the rage now is to use the add-on Stash to store any and all elements you need to use distinctly as stash variables that you set and then get - similar to the above, except that once you set them, getting them has to happen at a later parsing stage. The beauty of this approach is stash will store the "set" variables for reuse either at a user or site level, and you can determine what the expiry period is - which then results in better performance. When you apply this broadly using the "template partials" mindset, you can store everything with stash, and then call them into a small number of wrapper templates. This makes it possible to use stash to set, for example, your entry title, then get it three separate times in the wrapper template without any additional load - no need for separate loops within your template - one loop to set the variable, and then you can call that variable as needed in your template - it's kind of like creating global variables on the fly.
I would also suggest looking at Stash.
Related
I've recently started making a website using the X-Cart platform.
I've read some of pages from the official documentation, but a lot of things do not match the current version of X-Cart (5.3).
From what I understand, they switched from Smarty to Twig, but the file locations and hierarchy have changed as well. Even the database structure is modified and old tables don't have the same names.
I'm currently trying to entirely replace the header / footer of my website. The HTML files are included in lists and displayed with twig, but I don't know how to find those specific files.
Also, I've used the Webmaster Kit add-on in order to find the templates. The problem is that every single element displayed on the page is built from multiple places. Most of them can be found in /customer/layout/, but are part of lists such as layout.header, so the twig files only include the wrappers and retrieve the rest of the code from the database, at least that's my understanding of the situation.
{##
# Header logo
#
# #ListChild (list="layout.header", weight="100")
#}
<div id="{{ this.getUniqueId('logo') }}" class="company-logo">
<img src="{{ this.getLogo() }}" alt="{{ t('Home') }}" />
</div>
I tried accessing layout.header through my database, but the table shown in the documentation doesn't exist anymore.
Could someone please explain the hierarchy and guide me through the steps to create a custom header / footer ?
I did create my costum module, but I still don't know which files are the right to edit in order to make changes happen on my website.
Thank you, let me know if you need additional details.
The header section is defined by the skins/customer/layout/header/main.header.twig template or you can just assign all needed templates to layout.header view list and it will have the same effect. You may also want to remove existing templates and viewer classes from this list.
All these procedures are explained here:
http://devs.x-cart.com/en/getting_started/step_2_-_applying_design_changes.html
http://devs.x-cart.com/en/design_changes/basic_guide_to_theme_creation.html
If you want to look up what templates and viewer classes are in the list, then you can run following MySQL query:
SELECT * FROM xc_view_lists WHERE list="layout.header";
As for footer, the layout.footer defines this area or just override the skins/customer/layout/footer/main.footer.twigtemplate.
Hope, it helps.
Tony
I´m trying to understand how the use of the stash plugin will affect the URls of my site.
The traditional way:
I have a template group called site. Within the TG site I have the templates articles, about_us, etc.
The URl will for a single entry be
www.mysite.com/index.php/site/articles/title_of_respective_article
URL for the About-us-page:
www.mysite.com/index.php/site/about_us
Both will reflect the template_group/template structure and thus be SEO-friendly and give users a hint where they are on the site.
But when I use stash I will have 2 wrappers (one for the homepage and one for the rest of the site.
Partials will be used for header, main content and footer.
As far as I understand it, I´ll use the template_groups layout for the wrappers and partials for the main content.
The templating look like
Two wrappers build the TG "layout" Both are hidden, since they should´nt be called directly.
layout
.homepage
.site
Three partials in the TG partials
partials
header
main_content
footer
And by the way shouldn´t those not also be hidden, since they aren´t complete HTML-pages either.
This is what confuses me. How do I get my nice URLs back?
A URL like
www.mysite.com/index.php/site/about_us
will not match the TG/T concept anymore.
Any help?
To expand on both their answers above, and just to be specific to your www.mysite.com/index.php/site/about_us request:
You'd create a template group called "site" and then you may alternatively have something like this code in the /index template
{embed="layout/.site"}
{exp:channel:entries limit="1" disable="categories|member_data|pagination"}
{exp:stash:set name='title'}{title}{/exp:stash:set}
{exp:stash:set name='maincontent'}
<section>
<h1>{title}</h1>
<article>{content}</article>
</section
{/exp:stash:set}
{/exp:channel:entries}
The embed calls the .site layout and the interior simply pulls your specific channel:entries data.
As you can see, it's still using the traditional templategroup/template ways of building URLs, it's just pulling data differently.
When using Stash and the template partials approach (which I don't use personally), the files you mention are all embedded. You still use the same template groups and template files as before.
The Stash-based approach is simply a different way of doing things within your existing templates - not a replacement for them.
Exactly as Derek says. The way to think about it is this - with the template partials approach, your templates contain mostly (if not only) the entries logic (channel entries loop, its parameters, what custom fields are in play for that channel, etc). The outcome of the logic gets stores as stash variables. The stash variables then get called upon by your embedded layout templates to display the content you've stashed. So your URL structure remains the same, but you have considerably less duplication of effort since the more you constrain your templates to logic (i.e. very little if any formatting/display markup) the cleaner they are and the easier it then is to manage your templates.
I'm creating a set of custom templates and structures for a Liferay site.
One structure provides for a repeatable section, which its matching template then iterates over.
However, for styling reasons, I need to know how many instances of the repeatable section are actually present, and I need to know before I loop.
So, the template code is something like this:
#foreach($thisChunk in $chunk.getSiblings())
[emit some HTML]
#end
I want to do some conditional logic before the foreach, and emit a different CSS classname on the containing element depending on how many $chunks there are.
Any ideas how to access the number of siblings without looping through them first?
Easy: $chunk.getSiblings().size()
How to find out? It's a plain old Java object (java.util.ArrayList in my quick test). You can find this out when you just temporarily debug your template with $chunk.getSiblings().getClass().getName() and then continue with the interface of that class.
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 have used Drupal and think I'm doing it wrong with EE. I want to create many blocks of embedded User created entries in some of the templates, but don't want to have to create a channel for each one. In Drupal I could create a block specific to the client's needs, but I'm stumped on how to do this in EE.
For example, I have three different content areas on the home page, top/middle and bottom. Client doesn't want to roll out blog entries, they want specific content put in each one. The only way I see is I'd need to create three different channels and embed as such for top, changing channel to middle and bottom for each block. Is there a better way?
{exp:channel:entries channel="top" disable="categories|member_data|pagination" limit="1"
sort="desc" dynamic="no" }
Would I use category group and categories to do this? Meaning, I would create top, middle and bottom categories to call out those entries in my "home" channel?
For less than 1 hour of billable work, you'll get hundreds if not thousands of hours of effort packaged up for you to run with. Someone always pays for code, why not you this time? :)
The solution you have found does work - but I've found that ultimately it does not offer the flexibility needed by many clients.
I've used the following solution for many sites and clients have been pleased with it.
1) Define your block data as channels. For example I often have a Sidbar Ad, Sidebar Scripts, and Sidebar text channels.
2) Use a playa field-type (or another relational field-type) to create relationships from a parent entry (a page) to theses sub content types.
This normally looks something like this on the backend:
3) You can now use the parent entry to display the sub content. You'll of course need to pull all this data into your templates with something like the following:
<div id="right-side">
{exp:playa:children}
{if channel_short_name == 'sidebar_javascript'}
{cf_sidebar_js}
{/if}
{if channel_short_name == 'sidebar_videos'}
{exp:channel_videos:videos entry_id="{entry_id}" embed_width="300" embed_height="238"}
<h4>{title}</h4>
{video:embed_code}
<p class="caption">{video:title}</p>
{/exp:channel_videos:videos}
{/if}
{if channel_short_name == 'sidebar_ads'}
{exp:adman:show group="{cf_sidebar_adman_block}" order="RANDOM" limit="{cf_sidebar_adman_block_number_of}"}
<a href="{ad_url}" target="_blank">
<img src="{ad_image}" alt="{ad_alt}" />
</a>
{/exp:adman:show}
{/if}
{/exp:playa:children}
</div>
We generally make a channel called something like "general content" with a single field that can have any kind of native formatting (none or xhtml would mostly be used) and then use it for one-off bits that don't fit into other channels. It's hard for the client to find these entries in the CP for editing, so we make front-end "edit" links that open the correct entry in the CP and are visible only to member groups with content editing permissions.
This will only get hairy if you really need multiple customized fields for this use.
I have never used Low Variables, but I am under the impression that it could be useful here.
While I agree with the posters talking about the value of add-ons, this is a particular need that I have never had any problem solving natively. Besides the issue of the cost of add-ons (which IMO is worthwhile) you also add complexity to your installation the more software you add to it, making it more time consuming to troubleshoot bugs and to upgrade EE.