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The LISE moduleThe LISE (short for List It Special Edition) module by JoMorg allows you to create lists that you can display throughout your website. A versatile module that you really have to try and see its many options! Rolf   19-10-2019Loading static content from a cookieless subdomainMinimize your HTTP requests generating your CMS Made Simple-powered website by loading static content from a cookieless subdomain. Rolf   30-11-2020Reuse of CGEcommerceBase address dataManage the address information of your webshop at the CGEcommerceBase modules Admin page and use it all over the website! Rolf   06-07-2018Search Form AutocompleteWebsite visitors can quickly find and select from a pre-populated list of values as they type, leveraging searching and filtering. Rolf   09-09-2019Create a webshop in CMS Made SimpleCreate a basic webshop using Products, Cart2 and Formbuilder modules. This method will provide a fully functional webshop, but without payment handling and order management. If you do need these, this tutorial will still be a good starting point for building your webshop in CMSMS. Rolf   29-10-2020Next-page button for the Gbook moduleShow guestbook replies from the Gbook module for CMSMS with "endless scrolling" instead of a paginated view. Rolf   09-09-2019How to use SitemapMgrSitemapMgr creates page and module sitemap, robots.txt and humans.txt files. Ready to use sitemaps for several modules like News, CGBlog and Products are included! Rolf   26-02-2022Share data between websites: the cache_remote_file tagThis plugin tag reads content from the source website and caches it for a adjustable time. When that time has elapsed, it checks if the source content is available. If so... Rolf   23-06-2018Setting up SSL in CMS Made SimpleLet's Encrypt SSL provides free SSL certificates, when your host provides popular control panels like cPanel or Plesk the installation for CMS Made Simple™ is very easy. Rolf   10-02-2019Smarty Templating BasicsIn this tutorial you get an oversight of the most useful Smarty templating codes, including practical examples. Rolf   23-06-2018Breadcrumbs for the CGBlog and News moduleAt www.welovecmsms.com I wanted a breadcrumbs trail as a navigational aid for the visitors. Rolf   23-06-2018Additional Front End Users module featuresA few extra's that help you using the Front End Users module in CMS Made Simple™. Rolf   23-06-2018Front End Users one field login formTo enter a protected area at your website using the FEU module you need a login name and password. Sometimes it is more convenient to have just one field. Rolf   23-06-2018Setting up Front End Users moduleA guide helping you to set up the Front End Users module in CMS Made Simple™ to easily protect the content of your pages. Rolf   23-06-2018Use module template output in multiple content blocksHow to use generated module content at different spots in your page lay-out. Gotta love Smarty. Rolf   23-06-2018Base CMS Made Simple page template with automated metatagsHow to build a CMSMS page template and show the news/blog title as the page title, get the correct canonical value for module detail pages, pass a correct image to social media websites, etc... Rolf   14-02-2019Using non-jQuery AJAX form submission in CMSMSA way to submit a form AJAX-style in CMS Made Simple™. A guestblog from the Dutch forum member Guido. Guido   23-06-2018Use a UDT for content stylingUsing PHP-code for styling a content page or blog article is probably not the first thing that comes in mind. But because of the easy way to name and call the UDT, and the flexibility of its content it is very useful!! Rolf   23-06-2018Easy way to use Font Awesome in CMS Made SimpleIn WYSIWYG editors Font Awesome code can be difficult to add, and when have multiple icons in templates it might be a bit confusing... Solution: a simple UDT! Rolf   24-06-2018SimplePieMgr templateIn this article I will show you tag examples, you can use building your own SimplePieMgr RSS reader template. Rolf   28-03-2021CGBlog Admin article list usability improvementsAs a frequent user of the CGBlog module, I sometimes miss the overview of planned blog articles. Using the core module_custom feature you can simply adapt Admin templates to your likings. Rolf   23-06-2018Server Time DifferenceHaving problems with start and end time settings in a module? A news article is published, but isn't visible at the frontend of the website... You could have problems with the time settings at your website and/or server. calguy1000, Rolf   07-04-2020Convert a string to availability imagesA simple and easy to use availability feature for CMS Made Simple™. A User Defined Tag (UDT) converts a comma seperated string of 0's and 1's into a list of images. Rolf   23-06-2018The power of Template Inheritance and the CMSMS Design ManagerTemplate Inheritance is an approach to managing Smarty templates in CMS Made Simple™ that resembles object-oriented programming techniques. Rolf   26-12-2019Force www on all your domains, or not...A generic piece of code you can drop in all of your root .htaccess files to force "www.", or do the opposite and remove the "www." in the URL no matter what the domain name is. Manuel   30-09-2020Smarty scope examplesCMSMS 1.12 introduces the concept of 'scopes' in Smarty templates. This version of Smarty does not treat each and every variable as a global. This will solve problems with... Rolf   23-06-2018Add a cookie consent feature to CMS Made SimpleWhen you have advertisements or certain social media code at your website, you might need a cookie consent bar at your website to comply with the EU Cookie Law. In this tutorial I will show you how easy it is to add one to your CMSMS website. Rolf   04-12-2023Simple listA User Defined Tag (UDT) in CMS Made Simple™ to convert a plain text content block value into an array of lines. Velden   07-08-2018CMSMS modules and 'endless scrolling''Endless scrolling', 'lazy loading', 'endless pages', 'infinite scrolling', is a feature that only downloads extra content when you reach the end of the current content. Perhaps the most famous example is Facebook. You can scroll down your 'wall' and it will (probably) never end. Velden, Rolf   15-09-2021How to make a sub folder site appear as the root websiteHow to have a website in a sub folder but let it appear as the main domain. To have a more organized root folder at my web server I have my personal website installed in a sub folder. Now I have a better overview over all sub websites. Rolf   10-06-2019Printer-friendly pages without a moduleThere is really no need for a module to create printer-friendly pages at your CMS Made Simple™ website. In this tutorial I will show you how you can do this! Rolf   10-06-2019Additional anti-spam feature in Gbook moduleThe Gbook guestbook module for CMS Made Simple™ has a built-in anti-spam feature. It uses the b8 statistical (Bayesian) spam filter. At one of my websites where I use the GBook module I noticed spammers are getting more clever trying to by-pass the filter and it leaves me more work checking ham or spam... I found a really simple method to hide and show the form. When there is no form, a bot can't fill it in... Rolf   17-11-2020Website style switcherTo make a website accessible for visitors with visual impairments I needed a style switcher to change the output of the template. Not only for text and background colors, but also for (layout) images. Rolf   21-08-2019Customizing Admin theme without hacking filesIf you want to make small changes to the default CMSMS Admin theme, you can change the core stylesheet files with the risk of overwriting it when upgrading the CMS. But creating a custom Admin theme might be a bit of an overkill for a few changes... CMS Made Simple™ has a - not very well-known - feature for doing this without any risk! Rolf   10-06-2019Breadcrumbs for the Products moduleThere isn't one method for adding a breadcrumb trail to the Products module for CMS Made Simple™. Climbing down the 'hierarchy ladder' to the product, you pass three templates and each template has its own method. Rolf   10-06-2019Group Company Directory items in alphabetical order and add shortcutsThe Company Directory module is good to show an overview of companies and contacts at your CMS Made Simple™ website. With a little adjustment to the summary template you can group the output in alphabetical order and add shortcuts to the entries. Rolf   29-03-2021UDT that outputs the current seasonAt our community website I made a header with a changing photo of our village and the surrounding area. I made four folders with photos, one for each season. With a User Defined Tag I read the date and determine what season it is and set it in a Smarty string. With that I change the output of the photo gallery path. Rolf   10-06-2019Create a progress bar with Smarty and CSSIf you want show your visitors i.e. the received money vs. the goal for a charity collection or show the still available tickets to a concert, it is nice to show a progress bar. You can do this with a few lines of Smarty and a bit of CSS. Rolf   10-06-2019Pass a parameter to a global content blockIn CMS Made Simple you can pass your own parameter to a global content block. Rolf   10-06-2019content_type UDT for use in CMSMS 1.12.x and 2.xIn several of my tips and tricks articles I use the content_type UDT to change the content type of the page. In the 2.x release of CMS Made Simple this method is changed and won't work anymore... Rolf   10-06-2019Smartphone call me linkA small User Defined Tag that can be used to create clickable call-me links of telephone numbers when the website is opened in a mobile web browser. After clicking the link it first opens a pop-up box asking for confirmation, to prevent accidental phone calls. Rolf   10-06-2019A XML or RSS-feed reader with plain SmartyCreate your own XML or RSS-feed reader with plain Smarty, there are no external modules or plug-ins needed! Rolf   25-03-2021Risk is probability times impact"The calculation of risk is probability times impact". This is not just a random quote (to me...) It is the basis of risk management that I used a lot in my daily job as a maintenance engineer. Now I still use it when I develop my websites, in example for... Rolf   10-06-2019Easy way to combine and minify JavaScript files and codeLoading separate JavaScript files delays the rendering of a web page. Having a large CMS Made Simple website with multiple JS files, it can have a serious effect on your total page load time. Combine the files into one JS file - just like the {cms_stylesheet} tag does for stylesheets - is a solution for this. I was looking for a simple method to achieve this, but... Rolf   10-06-2019Honeypot anti-spam feature for formbuilderIn this tutorial I will show you how Velden a honeypot anti-spam feature added to a Form Builder form in CMS Made Simple. Velden   10-06-2019Using strip tags in templates and stylesheetsStrip white space in templates and stylesheets can improve your website in different ways. But what are the best spots to put the strip tags? I always forget it, so will post some examples here to help myself, uhh you :) Rolf   10-06-2019Highlight moderator name in CGFeedback resultsAs the owner or moderator of a CMS Made Simple website using the CGFeedback module, you often reply to questions asked by visitors. But how to let the visitors see *you* are answering and not another person with your name...? Rolf   10-06-2019Mousetrap for template errorsSometimes difficult problems have simple solutions. I noticed in the adminlog of one of my CMS Made Simple™ websites some template errors have occurred, but I didn't know where exactly... Well, just browse the pages and search for the broken page you would say. But this is easier said than done, it is a huge website with let alone over 2000 blog articles. No way I could solve it this way. I created a... Rolf   28-10-2021FormBuilder template and stylesheetThe default form template and stylesheet provided by the excellent FormBuilder module for CMS Made Simple™ is straightforward. Just the very basics are there. In this post I try to give a more extended styled form template. I hope it will give you a headstart styling the forms at your CMSMS website. Rolf   23-06-2018Direct link to searchresults Products moduleAt my no salt diet website I use the Products module for a Nutrient Database. When you want to know the nutritional values of in example an apple, you type "apple" in the searchbox, hit the submit button and you will get a list of all items containing the word "apple". So far, so good. But what I missed is a direct link to the search resultspage in case people ask me questions about some product. I created a work around to achieve this. Rolf   23-06-2018Formbuilder form in a FancyBox modal viewIn this guestblog CMSMS forummember Velden will show you how he implemented an Ajax based 'call-me-back' Form Builder form, that pops up in a FancyBox modal view. Velden   11-06-2018Website maintenance tipsWhile helping people at the CMS Made Simple forum I have seen a lot of websites and different working methods. I also notice pitfalls and see people having problems that I think could have been prevented... Rolf   23-06-2018Flexible HTML code block in your blogs WYSIWYG editorSometimes you need to add HTML-code to a blog article, i.e. an iFrame or some code to include a third party (YouTube) movie. Using a WYSIWYG editor this isn't possible, you need to put the code in a Global Content Block and copy the GCB-tag in the text-editor. Having a small website this works fine, but for large websites it is a different story. The down side is you get lots of GCB's associated with different articles, the admin doesn't get clearer of it... Rolf   23-06-2018Multiple pages in one with jQuery tabsOne page showing several other pages without reloading the page. The CGSimpleSmarty module for CMS Made Simple™ will help you! Rolf   23-06-2018Create your own slider for news articles or imagesI will describe the basics of how to create a slider, you can use it yourself in your CMS Made Simple module templates. Think of rotating summary views of the News or CGBlog modules or rotating company logos in the CMSMS Banners module. Rolf   29-08-2018Building an image library in CMS Made SimpleAt my Pneumatic Tube website I show lots of photos. In order to meet all ownership laws (at least try to) I must find a way to document the source information of the photos at my website. Just a photo album module isn't enough... I needed an Image Library at my website! But there isn't an out-of-the-box CMSMS module for that... I had to think something out myself! And if I say so myself, I have succeeded! :o) I will briefly describe what I used and did. Rolf   23-06-2018Tabbed content using jQueryTabbed content is a great way to have much content on a page (which might be SEO-friendly). I used it for a multilingual solution at my website. I will show you how easy it is to add them to a CMSMS template. Rolf   19-05-2018Smooth page scroll to an anchorWith jQuery you can easily create nice smooth page scrolls to different content blocks. Rolf   24-09-2020Call a Smarty tag from a UDTFor my pneumatic tube website I used the Products module for CMS Made Simple as an image library. The module was great for this purpose, I can add images and can store additional information in custom fields. But for adding a single image to a page I needed a large module tag with parameters. If at some point I want to change something here I need to change all tags in the pages... I searched and found a method to make this easier for me... Rolf   10-06-2019Create a RSS feed without a moduleI will show you an example RSS feed in combination with the CGBlog module for CMS Made Simple. You can also use it for several other modules, like News, CGCalendar, etc. You need to change the Smarty tags in the feed template matching with the module used. Rolf   14-10-2021Create dynamic sitemap, humans.txt and robots.txt filesTo help search engines like Bing and Google index your website you can use sitemaps and a robots.txt file. A module like SiteMapMadeSimple is a great solution to create your static sitemap. A disadvantage of the module is that after each content change the sitemap file is recreated. For very large websites it can take a while... I had that problem at one of my own websites. A few hunderd pages, a few thousand... Rolf   10-06-2019Assign a different header image per pageA recurring question at the CMS Made Simple forum is how to show a different header image for each website page. In this article I will show some examples how this can be done. Rolf   10-06-2019Add tags to the CGBlog or News moduleIn this tutorial I will show you a simple method (using Smarty) to add a tagging feature to the CGBlog, News and other modules in CMS Made Simple. Rolf   10-06-2019Change website lay-out depending on page contentWith this sample template you have three content blocks, the frontend of the website will change depending on the presence of content in these blocks. There is no need for multiple templates. Rolf   10-06-2019Set, read and debug cookiesA cookie, also known as an HTTP cookie, web cookie, or browser cookie, is usually a small piece of data sent from a website and stored in a user's web browser while a user is browsing a website. You can use cookies to store user settings for i.e. website styling, language preferences, etc. I will show you how to set, read and debug cookies at your CMS Made Simple website. Rolf   04-04-2018Marking protected pages in your navigationWhen using Calguy1000's FrontEndUsers module in CMS Made Simple you can easily protect the content of your pages and hide the buttons in the navigation for visitors who are not logged in. But when you are logged in, you can't see the difference in the menu between regular and protected page buttons. With a small addition to the menu template you can add that feature. Rolf   10-06-2019Show a list of the recently updated pagesOutputs a list of recently updated pages. This code is forked from the CMS Made Simple {recently_updated} plugin. At the existing CMSMS plugin it isn't possible to change the lay-out of the output. I needed it for my website though, so I created this UDT which gave me more flexibility. Rolf   10-06-2019GeSHi - Generic Syntax HighlighterAdd the Generic Syntax Highlighter (GeSHi) to the frontend of your website. Rolf   10-02-2019Multilingual template for CMS Made SimpleIn this article I will try to give a description of my second approach to create a multilingual website with basic CMSMS functions. Rolf   23-06-2018Make a link to a fileUser Defined Tag to create a link to open a file, followed by the filesize. Rolf   23-06-2018Get a page's root parent's hierarchy-positionThis User Defined Tag gets the hierarchy-position of a pages very top parent. Rolf   06-06-2020Get a page's root parent's aliasThis User Defined Tag gets the alias of a pages very top parent. Rolf   06-06-2020Count itemsSmall User Defined Tag that count items in an array, useful for several modules like News, CGBlog, Products, etc. Rolf   23-06-2018List of imagesAn example UDT which reads the images in a folder and shows it in a unordered list. With JQuery, Fancybox and some styling you can use it to create a simple photogalery. Rolf   23-06-2018Table of contentsGenerate a table of contents for your pages based on the heading tags. It requires, depending on how you want to use it, IDs or anchors in your page. Rolf   23-06-2018Add a class to all page(groups)You can use this small tag to get yourself a class name for the current page. This is very useful when you want to apply particular CSS style only to a certain page, or a subset of pages. Rolf   01-07-2018Test templates without breaking the frontendYou need to do some tests at your website. But you don't want to break the frontend for your visitors. A simple solution using Smarty. Rolf   23-06-2018Sort array modifierSorting the output of an array with this simple Smarty modifier. Rolf   23-06-2018Styling formsStyling a website form isn't that hard. A stylesheet example making your life much easier. Rolf   23-06-2018