CMS Made Simple Development Cookbook

The CMS Made Simple Development Cookbook gets you started building feature-rich sites quickly, regardless of your experience level. It contains clear recipes that introduce the key concepts behind each approach to extending the CMS, while also providing examples of solutions to real-world problems. CMS Made Simple has great capabilities "out of the box," but one of its great strengths is the ease of extending those capabilities. You can add a surprising amount of functionality just by customizing the core modules, but once you learn to write your own tags and modules, your ability to add features is virtually limitless. What this book covers Chapter 1, Understanding CMS Extensions, introduces the key differences between tags, user-defined tags, and modules, and teaches you to determine which is optimal for any given purpose. This chapter focuses on understanding the different approaches and deciding which to use to solve any particular problem. Chapter 2, Programming with Smarty and Core Modules, demonstrates the use of Smarty and template logic to achieve complex functionality without installing anything beyond the CMS Made Simple core. You'll see how to do things you never thought were possible – all without writing any PHP code. Chapter 3, Getting the Most out of Tags and User-Defined Tags, gives examples of Tags and User-Defined Tags, and shows how to create tags to handle such varied tasks as setting Smarty variables, filtering content, interfacing with modules, and interacting with web services. This chapter also includes information on some key CMS components, security pointers, and more. Chapter 4, Getting Started with Modules, shows how you can use tools to jump start the module writing process, and demonstrates how to write fully-localizable modules in a maintainable and memory-efficient fashion. This chapter will give you a good basic understanding of how modules are organized and how they work.