Hi Brett,
I had exactly the same requirement. I didn't use a plugin, but wrote an ASP 'page' that runs every two hours as a scheduled job (called by the CMS). The ASP page contains the RQL to get the last 5 changes. The reason I used a scheduled job is that the RQL execution was quite a drain on performance, so it was better to run it periodically. So the ASP/RQL creates the HTML for a bulleted list (populated with the page data) and stores it in an ASP Application Variable. I didn't want the RQL being called every time our intranet home page was reloaded! The home page just includes the Application Variable, and loads in a flash. I ought to just warn you of some problems I hit during the development process: 1) We had to go with 5-most-recently-created rather than 5-most- recently-changed, because in our version of the CMS (7.1) there is not an RQL function available which will return a set of pages in descending order of lastmodified. The manual says you can use the "orderby" attribute, but that doesn't work -- you have to go with a better page search called xsearch, which is not in our CMS version (even though the RQL manual for 7.0 includes it). I took this up with Support and they confirmed that "orderby" doesn't allow sorting by lastmodified, and that xsearch doesn't work in 7.1. 2) When using RQL to return a list of recently-modified/created pages, you have to then filter out container pages, i.e. sections of a page which RedDot calls a 'page', but actually aren't. In that case, you'll need to look back up to the parent (or grandparent) page to find the 'real' page. What I had to do to find the real page was to look at the page returned by the RQL, then look at its linking/ appearance schedule to see where it was linked, then from that, look to see which one is the primary link, then check that link to see what kind of placeholder the page is being linked to; if it's a container type, then look one level up and try again. It was a real pain. 3) You'll need to filter out pages of templates that you know you don't want included. For example, we didn't want our news pages hitting the top 5 changes, because they're covered in their own section. I did this by giving a list of unwanted template GUIDs to the ASP code so that it could ignore these pages. We also didn't want pages that were unlinked... etc. etc. 4) You'll almost certainly need a method for allowing adhoc pages to be removed. Whatever you might think, there'll come a time when somebody demands that XYZ page gets removed, and there needs to be a way to do it. At first, I added these adhoc removals into the ASP code, but eventually ended up having to build a simple database with an HTML admin interface so that non-techy people could pull a page off without me being around. May the force be with you! --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RedDot CMS Users" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/RedDot-CMS-Users?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
