I have a question to Magnolia CMS (integrated with Spring) users.
I have to write e-shop integrated with CMS where we can divide all pages into two categories:
Edited and added by admin
static pages like user account settings, shopping cart etc.
First ones, must be totally customizable by admin - I mean, admin must be able to create his own template, add text areas or graphics/video whenever he wants. He also must be able ( this is very important) to create new products which must be also stored in db to be accessible for the application code ( to fill the products list by myself in the code or to set the prices on the static admin pages).
So user can add as many products as he would like, create separate template for some of them and I have to be able to search for this products in db ( for example when user try to use search criteria). The search panel must be created by me - but where admin will place it is up to him.
The second type of pages are static pages done in JSP and I do not expect to change it using CMS.
As the second type of pages is of course not a problem, I do not know what CMS solution I should use for first type of pages.
I thought about Magnolia CMS, but as I can see all templates must be created by programmer in the code.
Also I'm not sure if it's possible to implement mechanism to maintain products ( inside the e-shop) - from one hand admin must be able to add templates for them in CMS, but I must be able to access them from the code ( to maintain them at shopping cart, make invoice etc). The product prices are set from admin panel ( static pages) as well- not from CMS of course. Maybe I can add any single product at the static pages ( insert it into the db) and somehow connect CMS page with it ?
I also need to add that main page template must be designed by HTML designer, so perhaps it would be plain HTML and this main template would be updated due to the admin needs in CMS.
Cloud anybody please advice me the best CMS solution where I can achieve all this ?
Best Regards
I've seen fair number of shops implemented that way with Magnolia where you use spring & web flow to manage a shopping cart and checkout process, while letting editors to create & customise products & categories & promos available in the shop.
You can also get similar (w/o spring) integration just by installing shop module of Magnolia. It's product and product category management might come in handy even if you were to replace checkout by your own.
To answer the other questions and stipulations
you can write your templates in ftl and models in groovy and have those hosted inside of the repository, thus giving access to them to editor and allowing her to change whatever needs to be changed. However there is also danger in that since templates are responsible for generating html, editor might be able to break html layout by making changes directly to the templates. While you want editor to create new products and modify existing ones, Magnolia lets you separate template of products from the content of products so you can let editor to edit just all the fields that you deem editable for given product without having her to ever access html or ftl directly.
as you mention, html will come from designer, so what you pbly want is to take that html, break it into functional blocks that repeat in multiple pages, save it as ftl templates and replace sample text in there with FM tags to retrieve such data from Magnolia. Actually, even better, download the STK static prototype and hand it over to your graphic designer. Tell her to create design by changing css/js/images only, but not to change structure of the html itself in the prototype, then you can truly just drop in css/js/img provided back to you by the designer.
regarding static pages - you can always serve them from Magnolia even if you don't expect anyone to ever edit them (since it usually happens sooner or later that someone wants to edit them) or you can simply configure bypass for the url for such pages and have Magnolia ignore them so they can be served by underlying application server container
to bring in Spring based application, you might consider looking in more details at and using Magnolia's Blossom module which will in turn let you annotate your spring controllers to be treated as Magnolia templates to make integration even more simple.
HTH, Jan
Related
I am trying to figure out in which file I need to add the Google remarketing tag. I know it needs to be added before the closing of the body tag. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
Thanks
here is I did in the past:
Depending on what kind of google tracking you are using you have a few different way to use:
1) If only add a custom code and should be in all the Magento page, use the "Miscellaneous Scripts" value going to admin section, System > Configuration > Design > HTML Head - Miscellaneous Scripts. (This will be included before head closing tag in page HTML.)
2) By native Magento already have Google Analytics tracking code and you can find this configuration going to admin section System > Configuration > Google API - Google Analytics.
3) If you are looking something more complex and use the Google adWords I used the extension magento connect link. For a particular Client I did some extra modification to include some extra code if a client subscribe to newsletter or a new client etc.
I hope you can find something helpfully in the post.
Best,
GrinGo.
There are different template file for different pages in magento so at first I think you should decide where to place it.For example if you want to place it in footer than you should place that code snippet in
"app/design/frontend/base/default/page/html/footer.phtml"
Similarly you can check other different template files to place your code.
NB:Best practice is to overide the core file of magento before making changes to it.
Hope this will help.
There's no indication as to which Magento version you're using 1 or 2. At the end of the day it depends how much technical knowledge you have and if you're using a version control system to manage your Magento build.
Miscellaneous Scripts as another answer mentioned earlier, this approach is straight forward and very easy to use to plug and play your code.
Google Module depending which version of Magento you use (CE/EE) there will be a built-in section for you to plugin your account ID in backend Magento configuration and then the platform will generate necessary code for you.
Write custom module by writing your own module you can place it the snippet anywhere on the page by targeting before_body_end node in your layout XML file. This is more technical but gives you more control over what you can do.
Google Tag Manager this also depends on if your Magento version comes pre-built with Google Tag Manager module, then you can create a container and place all your logic in there. This is also more technical and require the output of some values in JS format on the frontend to let GTM read the values.
At the end of the day go with what is easy to setup, portable and easy to manage. I usually go with Google Tag Manager as it takes time to create initial setup of exposing data on the frontend but then I have full control of what I want to do with that data through tag manager. In most cases you'll end up using the same data (ex. totals, shipping method, product IDs, SKUs, cost, etc.) in more than one third party API so this gives you flexibility to do just that.
I need to develop a magento extension which adds some content to particular pages such as the product view page. More specifically, on product pages, a button/link needs to be added to add the product to a third-party wishlist site.
Now I did some research, and it's not entirely clear what the best approach would be:
Use event/observers to intercept the 'core_block_abstract_to_html_after' event and adding my html there if needed
Use local.xml in app/design/frontend/base/default/layout/ to add my blocks on the correct page using either 'reference' or 'update' tags. However, can I package this local.xml in my extension? And if so, will it not possibly overwrite a user's own local.xml.
Use Magento Widgets? It looks like widgets need to be added manually to a page in the admin CMS panel, while it would be preferred to have a switch in the admin configuration to disable or enable the inclusion of the extra content.
Ideally, a user of the extension would need to do mininal configuration (or XML editing), and the extension must be compatible with existing layouts or modifications done by the user.
There's no single answer here, like anything software related it's all a question of what works best for you, your team, and your users, but here's a few general rules of thumb.
CMS Widgets are for content management. You create a widget when you want to create a simple user interface where store owners can create typed content, which can then be inserted into a page. Not a good choice to distributing an extension that needs to modify a page, or for creating an on/off feature. The ideal use case is a Magento solution provider creates specific widgets and a widget workflow, and a store owners content people update the widgets and add them to pages while managing a site's content.
The local.xml file is for layout updates that are local to this specific store/theme, and require little programatic logic. Your specific mention of adding a local.xml to app/design/frontend/base/default/layout would be a particularly poor choice for an extension you're distributing, as a user would lose this as soon as they added their own local.xml file to a theme. The ideal use case for local.xml is a developer working for a store owner (i.e. has a long term relationship with this particular Magento installation) who needs to build new pages or non-management content/interactive modules. Third party extensions shouldn't add anything to local.xml.
The official blessed way to distribute an extension that modifies an existing page would be to
Create a module
Use that module to add a new layout xml update file (see files like catalog.xml in core modules)
Use this layout update XML file to make your changes
This gives you the same functionally as local.xml, but keeps your code separate from a local user's system code. If you can add your block and implement your feature using only the features of the layout update xml files (block, reference, action, ifconfig, etc ..) this is a good choice.
Finally, there's using a core_block_abstract_to_html_after observer. This will let you add a block using pure PHP. Some PHP developers (myself included) prefer using this method as it's more programmatically transparent than using layout update xml files. The downside of using this method is if you attempt to grab a reference to a block
$block = Mage::getSingleton('core/layout')->getBlock('some_block');
$block->setSomeMethod('foo');
and some_block doesn't exist, you'll get you a fatal PHP error for calling a method on a non-object. That means your observers end up having a lot of code like this
$block = Mage::getSingleton('core/layout')->getBlock('some_block');
if($block)
{
$block->setSomeMethod('foo');
}
One of the benefits of using layout xml update files is these sorts of error silently fail on a production store (although it's that same silent failure that's maddening when developing a feature)
Hope that helps, and good luck! When in doubt, use the technique that lets your get your job done — you can always re-factor later.
I've an existing MVC3 project that implements a certain functionality, this project has it's own views, and a separate Database.
now I'm required to use the same functionality inside one of my orchard project,so I thought that I can host this solution in somewhere and view it inside an iframe or something.
Am I thinking right?,
is this the correct step to take in order to achieve this requirement inside Orchard?
to make it more clear, all I need to do is to view this solution and interact with it's controls and views from a hosting page inside orchard, and the subsequent requests should be handled by my solution in order to hit it's own data store and get back with the requested data in order to be displayed to the user.
any help would be appreciated.
Update:
thanks for Bertrand Le Roy for his answer, I can now view my solution inside my
orchard website.
I came in to one more HUGE problem, which is that my application can no longer connect to my external database.
I've a DB that is hosted in some where else, and I'm using EntityFramework to deal with it.
the problem is that if I put the connection string inside my module web.config, or main orchard web.config, I run into several types of errors like:
"System.Reflection.TargetException: Object does not match target type."
or
"System.Data.MetadataException: Unable to load the specified metadata resource."
My question is: How could I pass my connectionstring correctly to my solution, assuming that I'm using Entity framework as my ORM.
Many thanks.
You will need to put it into a module.
You will have to move route definitions to a Routes.cs file (look at any existing such file for examples).
You will also need, in order to access your data store, to opt out of the ambient Orchard transaction around the data access code (using (var scope = new TransactionScope(TransactionScopeOption.Suppress))).
If you are using dependency injection, you may have some work to move that to the Autofac-based way of doing things in Orchard.
If you want your work to appear seamlessly in the Orchard admin, you may want to decorate your admin controllers with the Admin attribute. If you want your front-end to use the current theme, you'll have to add Themed attributes and maybe refactor your views so that they only emit HTML for the content zone instead of for the whole page.
Add a manifest (module.txt) to your module folder and you should be good to go.
I'm just starting to play around with Orchard CMS. I like what I see so far, but I need to be able to create pages that display record details for data stored in another system. Does any one know if that is possible?
I have a SQL Server database that hold real estate property record information. This information gets displayed on the web. On that same website are informational content pages (FAQs, Contact Us, Home, etc...) What I would like to to is leverage the CMS portion of Orchard for the content pages. Then I would like to write a module using the Orchard that would get the real estate info, allow users to search parcels, and display detail pages for each parcel.
If you view the site http://www.sc-pa.com/search you can search by last name "smith" and select one record. That may help illustrate what I need Orchard to do.
Yes, that is possible, but your scenario is way too vague to get into any specifics. Can you elaborate on exactly what you are trying to do: what does the external data look like, where is it stored, how do you want to integrate it into Orchard, do you need any integration with content types and parts, or with search, etc.
One alternative is to expose ur data as web service or odata endpoint and then use jquery to do asynch call to get json data. Then ur home free.
Create a page and put the javascript in that or include a ref to js file.
I come from a background of coding my client website projects from scratch with MySQL and PHP. They are typically public facing sites with a mixture of static content, dynamic content plus a little functionality here and there (i.e. account, searching etc). Nothing too heavy.
So I generally code up a little CMS site to let them update what they need to, put it in a protected folder and that's that.
Now I'd like to use CodeIgniter and more of a MVC approach for my next site. Should I be doing anything to separate the CMS out from the rest of the site or is it simply another area (with its own controllers/models etc) and extra authentication?
There are several good methods to create an admin interface in CodeIgniter described at:
http://philsturgeon.co.uk/news/2009/07/Create-an-Admin-panel-with-CodeIgniter
You probably will want to look mostly at "#2" on his list; it's lightweight and not much additional work.
The CMS is part of the site, if by CMS you mean administration panel / backend of your application, you can use the above link provided by coreylink as it details different ways to create an admin panel.
My personal preference is to create a folder called 'admin' in my controllers directory and create semantically meaningful names so my urls are webapp.com/admin/users and so on.