Getting the most from the CMS.

[Mark.B]

I turned my CMS off as I'm unhappy with it.

That looks nice and neat, its not exactly what I'm after myself but its much better than what I currently have.

Believe it or not that wasn't a massive amount of work. It's mainly just template edits, just as you would do for anywhere else on your site. I also have the plugin in Reefland's sig for adding the avatar, that's it. (The date box thing is something I have plugged in to ALL content areas of my site, posts, blogs, groups, VMs, the lot).

The longer part for me was sorting the permissions out so it was visible to the right people. The admincp part of the CMS takes a bit of getting used to, it is not immediately intuitive. But the staff here will gladly help you with that (as they did for me).

Other than that, the layout is a standard two column layout. (I can't use the standard three column as my site if fixed width). I did minimal work on my CMS to get it like that.

[TheBen]

I've turned the CMS on again then you can see how poor it is. None of it shows the way I want, to sum up....

I have spent two days looking for a decent slider widget, I have tried every single widget on vb.org most of which do not work as intended or look poor.
The main article section shows a range of stuff I do not want it to show, I only want it to show a direct link to the article, currently it shows a preview, an image if one exists for the article, and a read more link, I don't need a read more link just the article header would do. It is the exact same for forum posts and also polls, I don't need all the text just the actual topic head of polls, threads, news items.

[Deverill]

Mark I love how on your articles you have have a image, the article details and then the date all in a nice little box at the top.

Oh thanks for the link to the other mod by the way

[reefland]

I've turned the CMS on again then you can see how poor it is. None of it shows the way I want, to sum up....

I have spent two days looking for a decent slider widget, I have tried every single widget on vb.org most of which do not work as intended or look poor.
The main article section shows a range of stuff I do not want it to show, I only want it to show a direct link to the article, currently it shows a preview, an image if one exists for the article, and a read more link, I don't need a read more link just the article header would do. It is the exact same for forum posts and also polls, I don't need all the text just the actual topic head of polls, threads, news items.

There is a slider widget how-to here in the vbulletin CMS. Take a peak at it.

As for just showing a link for the article, all that takes is a quick edit of the vbcms_article_preview (or something similar in name)template. It should be pretty easy to read that template and understand where the link, preview and read more are coming from (and therefore removing the read more and preview) leaving just the link. If you can't pull this off then you're not going to be able to do much with the standard CMS.

[TheBen]

There is a slider widget how-to here in the vbulletin CMS. Take a peak at it.

I did, I don't like the style of it.

[bszopi]

As reefland just said, you need to be looking at the CMS widget templates. The nice thing about the widgets is, you can define the template they use individually for every widget. So the best thing to do is, start with a widget and look at what template it uses. Go to that template, copy it the HTML, create a new template, and paste the code into it. Then start hacking away at it. Its basic HTML for the most part, so it should be relatively easy to do. Then goto your widget, assign your new template to the widget and see how it looks. Continue to modify your template until you get the look you want. Then move onto the next widget. You don't really need to edit any of the PHP code to change the look of it.

As far as the slider goes, what is the look you are going for? Can you provide an example?

[TheBen]

Pretty much got this the way I want it, unfortunately I cannot find where to hack the article preview on the homepage, I'm looking to make it just the link and then some preview text say 150 or 200 words for example, I don;t want any video or picture previews on the primary content. I guess as an example it would be....

News Article Title
News article content containing as many words as I want

Next news article title
Next News article content etc etc

Just need someone to point me in the right direction and then I'll go play around until I get it how I want it.

[nez]

I hate the VB CMS - it is boring, plain, & outdated. What's more frustrating is the fact that vB is focusing on mobile/facebook updates, which have a far less importance than a front page of a website (IMO). Hopefully one day vB will actually change the CMS to something that is decent, but I strongly doubt it. They're stuck in their own ways and fail to listen to their consumers.

I would suggest you get Wordpress as your front page and install VBSSO to bridge the two http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=270517

Another great CMS site is http://www.united-forum.de/news/

Good Luck

[TheBen]

I hate the VB CMS - it is boring, plain, & outdated. What's more frustrating is the fact that vB is focusing on mobile/facebook updates, which have a far less importance than a front page of a website (IMO). Hopefully one day vB will actually change the CMS to something that is decent, but I strongly doubt it. They're stuck in their own ways and fail to listen to their consumers.

I would suggest you get Wordpress as your front page and install VBSSO to bridge the two http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=270517

Another great CMS site is http://www.united-forum.de/news/

Good Luck

What is united-forums using as a CMS?

I actually have vbcms pretty much the way I want it I just can't get the article previews (primary content) looking the way I want, the word press actually does interest me as I have worked with it numerous time and its so easy to skin and get a decent look.

[baerwurz]

Nice vbulletin cms:

http://www.apfeltalk.de/forum/content/

[nez]

What is united-forums using as a CMS?

I actually have vbcms pretty much the way I want it I just can't get the article previews (primary content) looking the way I want, the word press actually does interest me as I have worked with it numerous time and its so easy to skin and get a decent look.

They are using vB cms.

[TheBen]

Is there anyone around who can point me to the right place to remove images from the article preview? I cannot for the life of me find it anywhere.

[Mark.B]

Is there anyone around who can point me to the right place to remove images from the article preview? I cannot for the life of me find it anywhere.

Try the template vbcms_content_article_preview
Search in that for {vb:raw previewimage}, there's a block of code around there that appears to deal with preview images and preview videos.

I would try adding <vb:comment> .... </vb:comment> tags around the code below, and see if this does what you want. if it works then you can either leave it commented out, or just remove it from the template altogether.

(I haven't tested this, it's just my best guess from a quick scan of the template!)

<vb:if condition="$showpreviewonly">            <vb:if condition="$previewvideo">
                {vb:raw previewvideo}
            <vb:elseif condition="$previewimage" />
                <a href="{vb:raw page_url}">
                <img class="cms_article_preview_image" src="{vb:raw previewimage}" alt="<vb:if condition="$attachment_settings['alt']">{vb:raw attachment_settings['alt']}<vb:else />{vb:rawphrase article_preview}</vb:if>" <vb:if condition="$attachment_settings['title']">title="{vb:raw attachment_settings['title']}"</vb:if> /></a>
            </vb:if>
        </vb:if>

Remember of course that after every upgrade you may need to revert this template and re-apply the changes.

[TheBen]

Thanks Mark, I got to do what I had to based on the information above, all I needed was to know what template to edit for some reason I kept looking in the actual FTP files.

[Sage Knight]

I can't see your CMS (permission error), but there IS help available on here to set it up properly, and then for heavier customisation there is vbulletin.org.

Not pretending it's right, nor that it's an easy road, but it CAN be put to good use and many of us on here are testimony to that.
http://www.bowlandcentral.com/forum/content.php?

That looks classy man. Post CMS tuts?