An Awesome Built-In CMS

[iAuto/iRealty Sales]

Did you know that iAuto and iRealty both come with a built-in CMS that is capable of doing lots of great things. Not only it is used for supporting the main functionality of iAuto and iRealty, the classifieds engine, but it can also be used to build a great website. Here are a few tips and tricks that you may use in your project.

First, there is a TinyMCE WYSIWYG Editor. We've selected it from a number of similar products searching for an editor that does not ruin the actual html code produced manually in the source code editor. We thought TinyMCE is the one, but alas, it isn't, it does have some minor considerations on how html should be formatted that it imposes on the coders. Some of us hate when a machine tells us what to do (hence the How to Get Rid of TinyMCE topic), but when you have finally managed to get rid of it, you're getting one big input window to do magic with it by hand (Notepad or UltraEdit are the best, aren't they? ).

Static page functionality is not only for creating the About Us and Contact Us pages. Say, you want to build banner ads that you may change frequently into your website template. One of the ways to do it by editing your main.tpl and index.tpl only once is described below:

1.  You create a static page (Content Management->Static Pages->Add A New Static Page), say, banner_1/ (type in banner_1/ into your url field).
2.  Since you don't really need to display it standalone, but rather on the front page as part of your main.tpl, write down the ID number of the newly created page (say, 18).
3.  Open main.tpl, find a good place to insert your banner, and put the following code there (say, it's in a formatting table cell):

Code:

<tr>
   <td>
      {module name="static_pages" function="show_static_page" pageid="18"}
   </td>
</tr>

As you've guessed, pageid="18" is the only thing we need to change in the above tag.

4. Open your banner_1/ and put whatever html formatting you may need to properly display the banner (don't worry about opening and closing tags for html, heading and body).
5.  That's it! Now, when you need to change your banner, you don't need to change the main.tpl file (especially if you put 5 identical banners all over the website), you can only change the banner_1/ html code and it displays the changes everywhere.

Here's another little one for you. Instead of having a misleading url for your About Us page (www.yoursite.com/about/), just type in about.html in the URL input box when editing your About us page, and it'll magically become www.yoursite.com/about.html.

You can be very creative by putting any code from templates into the snippets like the one I discussed above, as it can be very useful sometimes. Our next major release will have a much more flexible CMS, and you'll be amazed by what you will be able to do with it.