I’m building a website for a restaurant which consists of several static pages like ‘About us’ and editable menu.
I need a CMS flexible enough to be able to add items individually (by individually, I mean adding items doesn’t equal pasting a HTML list of n products into another static page).
Each item should contain its name, description, price and category. The list of added items should be displayed using templates the way I want them to.
Can you suggest any lightweight CMS which can provide similar conditions?
There are tons of options for simple page creation. Have you considered just using one of the many free website builders out there? Then you don't even have to worry about finding hosting, just make it happen quickly and easily with one of them. For instance, take a look at Weebly (review here) or Wix. Both allow for free pages and both are incredibly easy to use. Squarespace (review here) is another solid option (and one of my favorites) but charges a small fee (which I personally think is worth it).
Weebly allows for some slick drag and drop of page elements into place as does Wix. They are what I would classify as the easiest of the batch while Squarespace provides for an excellent user interface experience.
Other options if you'd prefer something hosted on your own would depend on your experience level. I am a huge fan of Processwire and ImpressPages has come along nicely and is great little CMS too.
These are exceptions to the typical Top Three that everyone tends to recommend I know but I like to spread the word about other projects instead of the usual ones.
Cheers!
Mike
Sounds like a job for Wordpress 3.0 plus Custom Post Types UI + Verve Meta Boxes plugins. Wordpress will handle the static pages, the other two plugins will allow you to make a Menu Item post type with custom fields.
It is not exactly lightweight, but you could do it with Drupal. You can define you own content type "product", use the CCK module to add your fields (price, ...) and use the Views module to display it how you want.
Drupal has a relatively steep learning curve, so it may be overkill for this project. It is definitely flexible enough for this, though.
Related
I have a page with categories and page with goods for each category. How should I divide my api endpoints?
is that correct to use something like this:
'/api/categories'
'/api/categories/:categoryId'
'/api/categories/:categoryId/goods'
'/api/categories/:categoryId/goods/:itemId'
or should I use structure like:
'/api/categories'
'/api/categories/:categoryId'
'/api/goods'
'/api/goods/:itemId'
Both answers are correct. There is usually no clear answer to questions like that. You can use one style of URLs, you can use the other style, or you can even use both with either the same resources available with two URL or with redirects.
The style of /api/categories/:categoryId/goods/:itemId has an advantage of nice hierarchy and more information in the URL itself.
But the style of /api/goods/:itemId has an advantage of being able to move goods between categories more easily, or even supporting multiple categories per item or adding tags in the future etc.
This is really something that you have to decide yourself, not only basing your decision on what URL seems better in itself but also considering your particular usage of the API that you're developing - like e.g. how likely it is to change categories, or how likely it is to access the goods without knowing the categories.
I recommend reading the tutorials about API design that were published by Stormpath. See:
https://stormpath.com/blog/fundamentals-rest-api-design
I particularly recommend watching the talks by Les Hazlewood that you can find on the Stormpath website, because he explains a lot of subtle topics like that.
So it's been two years since I last built a multi language site and I'm starting a new one strait away.
The last site I built I used the biber multi language module which seems to have had a name change since then and is now called Multi Language Support. With the last build I used matrix and an a drop down to set the language setting for each row, thus ensuring that each page was all in one entry and it would be easy to add additional languages, just by adding an additional row to the matrix field.
My question is twofold. Are there other approaches to consider at this point, since it's been two years since I last built a multi language site.
Secondly with the last site all the SEO (meta description, meta keywords and title tags were in English only) The new site will need all of this in both English and French. I typically use the SEO Lite module to handle SEO, but I don't see a way to have multiple languages available with this. Is there a simple way to set this up or will I need to go with matrix fields as mentioned above?
Am open to any and all approaches that are available for me to evaluate.
** UPDATE **
Will not be using Structure so that does not need to be a factor.
I don't have a long-winded answer, but Publisher from Boldminded looks quite nice and full of features. And it's on sale.
Brian is a great dev with great support. Based on past experiences with support I highly recommend taking a look.
http://boldminded.com/add-ons/publisher
I have been using a few different approaches:
Transcribe is have been using recently. It works very well with template rewriting, language variables. It's pretty easy to set up, but is also sometimes a bit too powerfull. It's supposed to work well with structure, but i have not yet really investigated it. one of the benefits is that you are not required to have all pages in all languages.
Structure
With structure and Low Variables you can easily set up a tree like:
home
/about us
/products
/nl/home
/nl/over ons
/nl/producten
You can reuse your field groups and not all content has to exist in the different languages
I would say it would depend on the size of the website. For a small site building out two columns out in matrix would be perfect like you have done. I have done this with a Mobile that simply had a column for English and for Spanish for all content elements as well as meta tags too. Then I simply passed a variable based on what language the visitor initially selected.
But I would say going with Multi Site Manager is probably your best bet. It's true that you will need to purchase some additional addons if you're using them on your 'default' site, but it's very easy to manage. Plus won't you want your URL structures to be different? For SEO purposes you'd really want to have spanish/french or whatever language to have its own unique URL.
I typically will use MSM and the NSM Better Meta addon. I would say this offers the most flexibility no matter the size of the site.
my approach on a couple of sites, regardless of size, has been:
Low Variables for in-template language variables
strategic planning of template group and template names (since it's the one
thing that's a bit more difficult to handle translation on with
anything other than htaccess)
a "languages" channel for extensibility
each channel has a language field which uses a radio button drawn from the languages channel so the language is assigned to the entry (and then used in the entries loop as a limiter)
Playa to relate the entry "equivalents" together with one another (i.e. allow a one to one language switch WITHOUT all the languages being in the same entry) - a relationship field is technically the better fix, but Playa has searchability where relationship fields do not
SEO handled with custom fields in the channels, with conditional fall back to a default set in Low Variables
This approach is what I preferred (I have used Transcribe but I did find it a bit resource intensive in terms of queries where this approach is a bit lighter, especially with caching). It allows me to maintain consistent enforcement and validation of required fields, for example, and allows for a variety of other benefits - language-specific entry url titles (without having to fore the content editor to create them manually), asynchronous content, asynchronous content translation (which always seems to be an issue - english is available before french is, awaiting translation, for example), separate workflows potentially, etc.
You can see this approach in action at www.cps.ca
I've done a number of multi-language sites with EE, albeit never with the Bieber module. My preference is to use Republic Variables for creating a variable matrix for labels (then it's just a simple flexible tag on the page). There's a bit of set-up that needs to be done, but once you've done it a couple of times it's only 5 minutes work:
A basic overview of steps (I've begun documenting them on my very old EE site):
1) Use the .htaccess method to remove index.php from URLs (making them clean) and in EE, set the system to use the title as the article link
2) Create ANSI directories for each language and move copies of index.php and .htaccess where
the system path is corrected:
$system_path = '..system';
and in the language director, create a .htaccess to relaunch queries with the current language:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php) [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /ru/index.php/$1 [L]
(check my site for more detailed directions)
3) Install the wonderful Republic Variables and set for the number of languages you need.
(_en for English, _ru for Russian, _es for Spanish, etc..) and make the same one default as the default language in your index.php. Under configuration, I prefer to set for a Language Postfix. Add a variable "teaser" for testing, and fill in all languages.
4) On the page, drop in a tag with this format: {variable_{language}}, e.g.
{teaser_{language}
and you should see the default language variable. Insert the language in the URL before the template/page (e.g., www.sitename.com/ru/directory/template) and the language will switch on the fly. I'll be documenting this in a follow-up post this weekend.
I think MSM could also be considered as an option for Multilingual sites, because of the following factors:
For content rich sites, MSM is really easier for content contributors, which are usually responsible for a signle language. The one language == one site equation is an easy one to understand
Multilingual websites tend to cater for various audiences. Those audiences needs usually evolve over the 3 or 4 years your site will last. MSM offers you the possibility to add sections or functionalities for a specific language down th line, which is a lot more difficult with a more entangled data structure
As a developer, an MSM setup offers you a lot of flexibility. Adding or deleting languages is as easy as copying, deleting an MSM site, SEO tend to be easier since you can translate your template / template groups / url_titles quickly. If your template structure is clean and if you use add-ons like low variables or even global variables to avoid having content in your templates, maintaining various sets of templates is really easy. It can also be a bonus if one day you need to deal with right to left languages or something like that.
Here is an example of a site I maintain
I also want to point out the Multi-Language Episodes on the EE Podcast:
http://ee-podcast.com/episodes/tag/multi-lingual
Ep 49 actually has Transcribe's Tom Jaeger chatting about multi-language process and gotchas.
Ep 54 has Nicolas Bottari chat about his processes
I'm creating a Book store in Magento and am having trouble figuring out the best way to handle the Authors of a Book (which would be the product).
What I currently have is an Attribute called "authors" which is multi-select and a thousand [test] values. It's still manageable but does get a little slow when editing a product. Also, when adding an option/value to the authors attribute itself, a huge list is rendered in the HTML making this an inefficient solution.
Is there another approach I should take?
Is it possible to create an Author object (entity type?) which is associated to a product through a join table? If yes, can someone give me an explanation about how that is done or point me to some good documentation?
If I'd take the Author object approach, could that still be used in the layered navigation?
How would I show the list of all books for a single author?
Thanks in advance!
PS: I am aware of extensions like Improved Navigation but AFAIK it adds something like attributes to attributes themselves which is not what I'm looking for.
For Googlers: The same would apply for Artists of a music site or manufacturers.
If you create an author entity type, you'll just increase your work trying to add it to layered navigation, and I don't see a reason why it would be faster.
Your approach seems the best fit to the problem, given the way Magento is set up. How are you going to display 1,000 (which presumably pales in comparison to the actual list) authors in layered navigation?
Depending on the requirements, you could go the route of denormalizing the field and accepting text for it. That would still allow you to display it, search based on it, etc, but would eliminate the need to render every possible artist to manipulate the list. You could add a little code around selecting the proper artist (basically add an AJAX autocomplete to the backend field) to minimize typos as well.
Alternatively, you could write a simple utility to add a new artist to the system without some of the overhead of Magento's loading the list. To be honest, though, it seems that the lag that this has the potential to create on the frontend will probably outweigh the backend trouble.
Hope that helps!
Thanks,
Joe
My web applications have pages that display many static fields.
I know that poor layout invariably leads to information overload and poor readability.
My Question:
Are there any best-practices or heuristics for laying out a screen that contains many static fields?
Ordinarily, I would reference Bill Scott and Theresa Neil's excellent book, but I can't seem to find any guidance for this issue.
Here are some guidelines that I'm inclined to follow:
Group related fields.
Position the major (or parent) fields towards the top and the left. Position the minor (or child) fields towards the bottom and right.
Don't feel obliged to fill every pixel. Consider white space if it will improve readability.
Favor progressive disclosure wherever possible.
Consider an accordion control.
Perhaps a Details on Demand approach would work well. Ask yourself which data are absolutely and immediately relevant to the user and group those, while hiding the other data. You can always provide an 'Expand' link or control that would allow a user to view the details if desired.
(It's good to see that you're looking at interface design patterns. They are often overlooked!)
I work on HR software and have faced this problem many times. One thing that we keep seeing in feedback when we introduce collapse controls or any progressive disclosure pattern really is that our users don't like the way those types of "web 2.0" (their words lol) pages don't print out. So just a reminder if your user base still insists on printing large pages of data include a print media stylesheet.
Depending on how large your set of data is I'd seriously consider a some search functionality or a sorting mechanism. Many times when the data set is large different users have different priorities and allowing customization is the only way to satisfy a wide audience.
I think you pretty much answered your own question, especially the grouping of important fields tied to progressive disclosure.
I need to develop a vertical search engine as part of website. The data for the search engine comes from websites of specific category. I guess for this I need to have a crawler that crawls several (a few hundred) sites (in a specific business category) and extract content and urls of products and services. Other types of pages may be irrelevant. Most of the sites are tiny or small (a few hundred pages at the most). The products have 10 to 30 attributes.
Any ideas on how to write such a crawler and extractor. I have written a few crawlers and content extractors using usual ruby libraries, but not a full fledged search engine. I guess, crawler, from time to time, wakes up and downloads the pages from websites. Usual polite behavior like checking robots exclusion rules will be followed, of course. While the content extractor can update the database after it reads the pages. How do I synchronize crawler and extractor? How tightly should they be integrated?
Nutch builds on Lucene and already implements a crawler and several document parsers.
You can also hook it to Hadoop for scalability.
In the enterprise-search context that I am used to working in,
crawlers,
content extractors,
search engine indexes (and the loading of your content into these indexes),
being able to query that data effciently and with a wide range of search operators,
programmatic interfaces to all of these layers,
optionally, user-facing GUIs
are all seperate topics.
(For example, while extracting useful information from an HTML page VS PDF VS MS Word files are conceptually similar, the actual programming for these tasks are still very much works-in-progress for any general solution.)
You might want to look at the Lucene suite of open-source tools, understand how those fit together, and possibly decide that it would be beter to learn how to use those tools (or others, similar), than to reinvent the very big, complicate wheel.
I believe in books, so thanks to your query, I have discovered this book and have just ordered it. It looks like good take on one possible solution to the search-tool conumdrum.
http://www.amazon.com/Building-Search-Applications-Lucene-LingPipe/product-reviews/0615204252/ref=cm_cr_pr_hist_5?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&filterBy=addFiveStar
Good luck and let us know what you find out and the approach you decide to take.