Tim Mahoney

I created a site last week, and submitted the URL, sitemap, and other information to Google, Yahoo, and Bing yesterday. The point of the site was to see if by doing a few things, I could get my site listed well in the big three search engines, and hopefully even get on the front page for several of the pages on the site.

Since it’s an experiment, I’m going to collect and aggregate date before drawing conclusions, but I want to start documenting the time at which I do certain things on the site while it goes on, so that I can remind myself to update the site with new content every day, in an effort to get the site ranked higher.

This is not a black hat SEO project, but rather (I think) a different method of getting traffic to a site. It will remain to be seen what the search engines think about it; I haven’t been hit by any of the spiders yet, so I’m still waiting to see what they think.

I’m probably going to collect data, and hopefully use it to educate myself and others on traffic boosting methods that are not evil.

Here’s hoping!

I recently had to do a website for a family friend who’s getting married. They were having a destination wedding, and one of the things they wanted to do on the site was have calendar items below a Google Map, with the addresses associated with the events reflected on the map.

I could have had it be a little redundant, but this is the sort of puzzle I like figuring out, so I set to work.

I use CMS Made Simple for most of the sites I do for folks nowadays, because it’s open source and excellently put together.

I installed Calguy’s Calendar and Google Maps modules, and set to work. I created an upcoming list template to display all the events; pretty easy.

One of the field definitions on the Calendar module was “Address” so that they could put in the event’s location. This would come in handy for my map points!

Next was getting the map set up. After setting up the module with the API key for Google Maps, I created an new map and added a central map point. (the map won’t display without one, something I didn’t realize at first)

The Google Maps module includes a plugin for creating dynamic map points on the fly. I created another upcoming list template in the calendar module to automatically create these map points dynamically. Sample code below. I had to use the smarty “assign” function to get them to work correctly; don’t ask me why.


{foreach from=$events key=key item=event}
{assign var=event_title value=$event.event_title}
{assign var=event_date value=$event.event_date_start|date_format:"%e"}
{assign var=event_summary value=$event.event_summary}
{assign var=event_address value=$event.fields.Address}

{cggm_add_dynpoint map=1 name="$event_title" address="$event_address" description="$event_summary"}
{/foreach}


This way, any new calendar item they created would be created on the map!

Note: when you add any code or dynamic points, make sure to add them below wherever you create the map! Otherwise they don’t show up!

So I had to create a system where users could register, login, and upload files. The system would need to show each user his/her files and no one else’s, and get in touch with the administrator to let them know a new file was uploaded.

There’s nothing inherent in CMS Made Simple to accomplish this, but I used a couple of modules (FrontEndUsers, SelfRegistration, CustomContent, and Uploads) to take care of the job. It’s easy enough that I know the developer meant it to be used this way if someone needed it. I’m not going to explain SelfRegistration here, that’s for another post. However, here’s the instructions for the Document Manager:

1. Install FrontEndUsers, SelfRegistration, CustomContent, and Uploads (Front End File Management)
2. Add 2 pages to the site. Call one “Document Manager” and the other “Send a File”
3. In FrontEndUsers, create the User Properties you’ll need for your registered users.
4. Create the User’s Group.
5. Put the “Document Manager” and “Send a File” pages behind a login using FEU
6. In Uploads, create the Category “Client Uploads.”
7. In the Page “Document Manager,” insert the code below:
   
{assign var=email value=$ccuser->username()}
{cms_module module="Uploads" category="Client Uploads" mode="summary" key=$email}


   For some reason, I always have better luck assigning any Smarty object variable to a regular variable before using it in another tag. Might be me, I dunno.

8. In the Page “Send a File,” insert the code below:
   
{assign var=email value=$ccuser->username()}
{cms_module module="Uploads" category="Client Uploads" mode="upload" noauthor="1" key=$email}


   Using the Key attribute for the Uploads module tag in both places inserts whatever file into the database with the key equal to the user’s username, and then allows me to pull it out by the same.

9. Pretty much done; make it look pretty with some CSS and you should be all set.

Users can register, login, and upload files. They only see their files, and the administrator can log into the backend and manage them there. Mission accomplished.

This was somewhat quick and dirty. However, it works very well for what I need and if anyone else would like to use it, go for it.

I had a need for a way to enable an administrator to manage photo galleries on a per-user basis. I figured that the best thing to do would be to make some sort of connector between Photo Album and FrontEndUsers, but I wasn’t quite sure that was possible, and also whether or not I could pull it off regardless. So, instead I edited FrontEndUsers, and Copied and created a new Module from Photo Albums and called it FEUAlbum. Neither of these modules will be supported by me, (unless there’s money involved) and I don’t expect to extend them beyond what I’ve done. Obviously the original authors of the modules are not going to support an edited version of their module.

Those disclaimers aside, here we go.

Vanilla installation of CustomContent is used.

In FrontEndUsers, I created a new “field type” in the User Properties called “Album.” Adding this to a group will make a link appear when you edit a user. Clicking the link, if the user has no photo album at the moment, will create the photo album using the user’s FEU id as the album id, and the user’s username as the album name. If the user has a current album created already, this link will take the administrator to it to manage it.

Copying Album to a new module was easy. Installing FEUAlbum will NOT overwrite anything from the original module (Album) and both can run side-by-side. New database tables were created throughout and the links to files are correct. All other functionality, including templates, works as expected.

Insert the module tag in the template or page like so:

{cms_module module="FEUAlbum" albums=$ccuser->LoggedIn()}

Calls the module and uses the user’s ID as the album number, which pulls in the relevant album. Obviously the user should be required to log in before access to the album is allowed.

The goal was to do the least amount of work and get the greatest functionality out of it. One caveat is that each user can only have 1 album assigned to them.

I hope this helps someone out; I’ve attached zip files for the edited modules.