I’m not a big fan of CMS Made Simple, but I end up doing a lot of sites in it by request. It’s taken me awhile, but I think I’ve found a way to structure templates that doesn’t make me want to club baby seals out of frustration.

First, what I don’t like about it. There are a lot of reasons, but these are the major ones:

  • Templates and stylesheets are stored in the database and edited through a textarea in the browser. This is the biggest frustration I have.
    • The textarea is only 685px wide, so lines frequently wrap, reducing the readability. I use Chrome, so I can resize the textarea on the fly, but it reverts back to the default every time I reload the page.
    • That’s another thing, I have to reload the page every time I want to save, rather than just CTRL-S in my text editor, which my FTP client automatically detects and re-uploads the page.
    • There’s also no syntax highlighting, which greatly reduces the readability.
    • I want to use a real, full-screen text editor with all of the normal features that programmers use, not a crappy little textarea where everything is squished together and looks the same, and where it takes 3 seconds rather than .25 to save changes.
  • The documentation leaves a lot to be desired. To be fair, some of my frustration can be attributed to the fact that I don’t really sit down and RTFM enough, but I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent reading and searching for answers to things that I would have knocked out in 5 minutes in Wordpress. There doesn’t seem to be any comprehensive explanations of how the system is designed and how you should interact with it.
  • It uses Smarty. I like MVC, and I’m warming up to Smarty, so I guess my real problem isn’t with Smarty itself, but with how CMSMS integrates with it. I hadn’t worked with Smarty before, so lacking any in-depth documentation from CMSMS, it took me a long time to figure out exactly where it fits into the architecture and how to do non-trivial things in it.

So, I’ve basically just bypassed CMSMS’s architecture as much as possible and done things the traditional way. Here’s how you can write a CMSMS template using a real text-editor and an FTP client.

  1. Store all your templates, stylesheets and code in a directory in /uploads/. We can then just include everything from CMSMS, instead of having to write them inside CMSMS.
    • Write all the templates (overall layout, page, module-specific, etc) in .tpl files using Smarty. It’s actually not that bad once you don’t have to deal with all of the other problems.
    • Then write a PHP class with all the methods you’ll need to pull and push data. Assign variables to Smarty so you can use them in your .tpl files.
  2. Create a User Defined Tag (named ‘example_header’ here) to include your class and template header 
    • global $gCms, $smarty;
require_once($gCms->config['root_path'] .'\uploads\2009-example\example2009.php');
$smarty->assign('example2009', new example2009);
$smarty->display($gCms->config['root_path'] .'\uploads\2009-example\header.tpl');
  3. You’ll still define a template in CMSMS, but instead of writing the markup/logic there, you’ll just call the external .tpl files. There’s a bug where the admin page content box won’t be displayed if you don’t call content in the internal template, so we call it, but run it through a modifier to make it empty. Then we can call it whenever and however we want to later on in the external file. 
    • 
{example_header}
{content|substr:0:0}
{include file="$exampleDir\\home-page.tpl"}
{include file="$exampleDir\\footer.tpl"}
  4. The class constructor can assign to Smarty any variables you’ll want throughout the templates, like the location of the template directory
  5. $smarty->assign('exampleDir', $gCms->config['root_path'] .'\uploads\2009-example');
  6. Module-specific templates just need to include the .tpl files 
    • {include file="$exampleDir\\calendar-header.tpl"}
{include file="$exampleDir\\calendar-month.tpl"}