This subject may have been brought up in the past, but if it has, it doesn't
seem that the midgard community is embracing it yet. So I would like to see
if any of the developers or experienced users can help to develop a standard
set of midgard code snippets which can be added to the midgard distribution.
I feel that anything which can help users develop their web sites should be
a top priority for the development of midgard. I understand that midgard is
still young, and that most of the time being spent on it is in working on
version 2, but in the mean time version 1.4 is out, and soon 1.4.1 will be
released. This is all good news, but I believe that there are a couple of
things which are keeping midgard from flowering into the user friendly CMS
which it presupposes to be.
As a simple non programming web site developer which I've been for the past
6+ years, I've seen the development of html page applications starting from
hard coding of html to the new Dreamweaver styled web site applications. The
software developers for these applications have always kept two
prerequisites for developing their applications. Functionality and
ease-of-use.
The current version of midgard has a lot of functionality, but it fails in
ease-of-use. Asgard is a great tool for the knowledgeable midgard
programmer, but it overwhelms the non technical user. And hklc's nadmin is
becoming a true user friendly cms for non programming web site developers as
myself, but it too could use some standard functionality in developing web
sites.
So what's the beef! Well, it has to do with simple navigation tools and code
which is lacking from all the above applications. I've been prodding and
poking through all the documentation at midgard and nadmin. I've read the
how-to introductions by two separate authors. I've spent the last two weeks
playing around with the VMUC code, looked at the old admin code, and there
has been little information to help me develop the navigation to create an
initial dynamic web site. The learning curve for a standard web site
developer who has no knowledge of php is too great! Something needs to be
done to make it easier for the standard web site developer to develop their
web sites on midgard without making them experienced programmers.
HKLC's NADMIN has taken the first steps in providing a "Master News" style
and news snippets. Kudos to Alan and his crew! But these snippets/styles do
not adequately cover navigation through a web site. They are a starting
point, but unless I go to the trouble of learning php, I will not be able to
develop a dynamic web site using midgard and nadmin.
This concerns me a great deal and should concern midgard developers. It
seems to me that, due to the amount of knowledge and experience that you
guys have, that it would take a reasonably short amount of time to develop a
set of generic code which could be put in a shared style or snippet for web
site developers who do not have php/midgard programming knowledge. Let's
face it, most web site developers on the internet today have little or no
experience programming! So I beg of you to consider setting a priority to
develop and include some generic navigation code as part of the standard
distribution of midgard.
If I may presume to give advice on the type of code needed for navigation, I
would like to suggest creating separate code for the following standard
navigation:
1. web site code which displays an index of:
a. all pages
1. sub pages
b. all topics
1. sub topics
c. all articles
1. individual articles
a. include the ability to add field information
1. ie; author name, address, from person record
d. forward, back, & top links for pages, topics, & articles
2. comment code so user can understand & select fields to use
a. allows for learning curve & publish web sites in a timely manner
I'm sure that there are other code snippets which could be developed, but if
we could just get the standard navigation codes included in the next release
of midgard, it would make midgard and nadmin much easier to use to set up
dynamic web sites.
I would like to now show you a little of my current frustration. Remember,
I've been playing with nadmin for over a week and am still unable to
establish a standard set of navigation links to my dynamic web site. After
reading the nadmin manual on news pages, and getting some hands on help from
Alan, I was able to successfully create the pages for the news as documented
in the nadmin manual. This was great, but not enough. I wanted for my
fullindex.htm to not only show all the articles in the topic, but also
display the sub topics and the articles within the sub topics. So I started
looking and modifying the news snippet code.
I've included a part of the news snippet which I copied to a <[news]> style
that I modified to get all articles, including articles from sub topics in
my fullindex.htm. By changing mgd_list_topic_articles to
mgd_list_topic_articles_all I was able to generate a listing of all
articles, including sub articles.
case "fullindex":
case "fullindex.htm":
if (substr($uri,-1,1) != "/") { $uri .= "/"; }
?><[fullindex_header]><?
$articleobject =
mgd_list_topic_articles_all($pageobject->display_topic);
if ($articleobject) {
while ($articleobject->fetch()) {
$article = mgd_get_article($articleobject->id);
// do a publish date check!!!
if ( mgd_is_article_online($article->calstart,$article->caldays)) {
$article->uri = $uri.$article->name.".html";
?><[fullindex_item]><?
}
$i++;
}
}
?><[fullindex_footer]><?
break;
This is great, but what I really wanted to do was to get only a listing of
all sub topics. I spent the better part of a day looking through manuals and
code, which by the way had little or no comments for users to understand. So
now I am at a dead end. I have no idea how to get my news page to
dynamically display sub topics or even topics without going through a long
learning curve. It seems that I am going to have to learn php AND midgard
before I can develop a simple dynamic web site using midgard and nadmin :-(
I was hoping that I would learn as I went along designing my web site, but
it seems that this is going to take some real time!
If any of you have some standard code for navigation through midgard, could
you please either send me a copy, or publish it here on the mail list? I'd
be happy to accumulate it, and put it together in one package, then submit
it to midgard for possible inclusion in the next release.
Thank you for your time and your efforts!
Sincerely,
enrique
E. Vega Studios
505 Luther Rd.
Apex, NC 27502
Phone & Fax: 919-362-0543
http://enrique.artmetal.com/ - not a dynamic web site, but it shows my art!
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
