RBCMS for Web Designers

For people, who are interested in an evaluation account, please click here to email me for one.
And once I've read your request.. I'll be emailing you a site admin and with your access details.

The picture on the right shows that initial menu that you will see once you have logged on to the system.



I think the best way to get a feel of the system is to start everything from scratch, so please click on Themes and follow the steps below:

  • On the far top right, click on "Add New Theme"
  • Just fill up the items as shown on the picture
DON'T FORGET TO MAKE IT DEFAULT
  • and click Submit

Ok, so now you have an theme named "test", so what now? well... here's a preview of what it should looks like.  you can see the same result when you click "preview site" on the theme's table.

Hmmm.... Not much if you take a look at it.  Lets see what the RBCMS site looks like on an empty theme.
It makes more sense doesn't it?
  • The upper most list is the navigation,
  • the middle part that says "Home / Getting Started / Web Designer" are the breadcrumbs,
  • and at the very bottom is the content.
Looks familiar? its actually this page, running on a different theme. cool right?  So lets see what the code looks like...
  • Click on Themes
    • on the theme named "test" click on "View Layouts"
    • I'm pretty sure as a Web Designer you know what are layouts, templates and css.  However, they do behave differently on the RBCMS, but so that not to complicate matters.  I will discuss this at the later part of the tutorial.
ok... there are 3 layouts for section.. frontpage, section, and archive. and when you click entry.. it has one layout called entry.

Layouts help you define the structure of the document. To help you better understand this, lets start with the basic.. click on "section". 
<html>
<head>
{include file="head.tpl"}
</head>
<body>

{include file="header.tpl"}

{$section.content}
{*$archive->dump($section)*}

{include file="footer.tpl"}

</body>
</html>
it seems simple enough..  RBCMS currently runs on the smarty templating engine.
Here is a short reference of the commands used in the example.

Name Definition Documentation
{* *} Comments, much like <!-- --> except that the comments are not included when the document is generated. Click Here
archive->dump() a function used to display a variable's contents. Click Here
section.content By adding this to your template, this word is replaced by the content that the user had composed. Click Here
include this tag includes a template that is found in your templates module. Click Here

I think the contents are self-explanatory.. <html> <body> head.tpl, header.tpl, footer.tpl and etc.. so lets do some coding so that you can get the feel for the system. Lets add <h2>{$section.title}</h2> just right before {$section.content}. 

The resulting template file should just about look like this.
<html>
<head>
{include file="head.tpl"}
</head>
<body>

{include file="header.tpl"}

<h2>{$section.title}</h2>
{$section.content}
{*$archive->dump($section)*}

{include file="footer.tpl"}

</body>
</html>
Click here to see what happens. and compare it to what it was before.

Do you get it now? You were able to add the section title directly into the document.. because you coded the "section" layout this way.. this will be true for every section that belongs to your site.

Lets try adding a section.. Click "Sections"

<<picture of sections highlighted>>

then at the top right click "Add New Section"..