Tucson Digital Arts Community (TDAC) Presentation

[thruska]

I just got back from a presentation with the Tucson Digital Arts Community (TDAC) here in sunny warm Tucson, AZ. It went really well and Barebones CMS was well received. There were five people there besides myself and everyone seemed to enjoy the presentation. Five people might not seem like a lot but that is five more people who know about Barebones CMS that didn't know about it before. Got to start somewhere.

The presentation really got in-depth on how the CMS operates. We went a lot farther than I was actually planning on going, which is good. We got to the point of the more advanced aspects of the CMS. Widget creation basics but not how to create a Shortcode and I forgot to mention Plugins (but I don't see plugins as being terribly useful - basically for the last resort sort of solution to a problem).

Overall, I enjoyed it and I'm pretty sure the members of the group did too. One scenario was given that got me thinking. On the way home, the solution dawned on me. The scenario was for advertisers outside the organization to be able to see proofs/previews of changes to a page (e.g. via the revision system) but not be able to edit the page nor have to have a login. Here is the simple solution:

One possible route would be to create a Widget that uses Process() and ProcessAction(). Process()'s 'body' would output the URL that would get sent to the client and would only display inside the editor. This URL would look something like:

http://barebonescms.com/advertisers/tdac...proofwid_2

Then, when that URL was visited, the widget's ProcessAction() function would then be called, and some code there would load in the revision system for the current translation, locate the latest revision of a 'proof' or 'test' branch [but should be named something consistent], overwrite the global $bb_langpage PHP variable, and then call BB_ProcessPage() to display the proof. In all, a total of about 5-7 lines of PHP code. And no login required. Plus, Widgets are reusable so this could be dropped onto any page in the CMS.

If security is a concern, the widget could generate a token/hash based on the URL and one of the secret configuration variables or something similar - and then check for the token before displaying the proof.

The widget wouldn't need to be anything terribly fancy nor need a configuration dialog. But that doesn't mean it couldn't be super-fancy with lots of features geared for the advertiser. The basic widget described above would only be about 15 lines of PHP.

Leave it to me to figure it out AFTER the presentation. But that's life.

Then again, I would have had to have dug around in the core or the documentation to create said widget. And would have had to install a syntax highlighting editor to properly edit the widget. I would have completely lost most people by the point I would have managed to produce a working widget. The documentation is a lot clearer on widget development than I can do "live".

Barebones CMS is very much alive even though the forums have little activity. Partly due to the fact that my local wireless network got hacked and consequently my computer got a bunch of malware dumped on it - forcing a reinstall of Windows. But I also really needed a short break before I dug into the next bunch of code on the CMS. After a year-long development cycle, anyone would need a short break.

I'm going to be doing mini-releases for a while just to let me catch my breath and let people start using Barebones CMS.