Here are some very useful tips and tricks that can help you get the most out of your PetchCMS website, allowing you to customise your site so you can set it up exactly how you like it.
With PetchCMS you can choose what happens to your forms, using the Form Manager. Each time a user submits a form on your site, PetchCMS can email the results or you can securely and privately view the results in the Admin Panel.
You can even choose to display all submissions for any form you create, on any page of your choice. For example, a user submits a comment on the homepage, you are emailed this comment, and this comment is also made available on the 'Comments' page for all other users to see.
These settings can be configured when creating or editing a form in the Form Manager, in the PetchCMS Admin Panel. View a Demo
Each time you add a piece of content, and new block is created, with its own unique ID. You can create links directly to any piece of content by adding a fragment to your URLs.
A fragment goes at the end of your URLs and follows the hash (#) symbol. To link to a content block, create an anchor consisting of the content ID, preceded by the letter 'c'.
For Example: To link to a content block with an ID of 168 on page 2 the URL will end /page2.htm#c168. Here is an example URL, which links to the content block "E-Commerce with PayPal" on the homepage.
You can translate PetchCMS websites in a couple of ways, using the Google Translate service.
Google Plugin Method: You can add the Google Translator Plugin to your menus or content. This plugin will include the Google Translate Gadget, and allows users to select another language from a list to translate the current page.
URL Method: You (or your users) can also translate your pages simply by adding a dash, followed by an international language code to the page URL. For example, "page45.htm-de" will show this page in German. URL Examples: Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Czech, Polish, Spanish, German
Which Method is Better?
By adding the language code to the end of a URL, you can create links to your pages which automatically switch language. Also, the URL method translates the Google Translate interface into the users chosen native language.
The Google Translate plugin is a little faster to setup, as you don't need to write any links yourself - just add the plugin as normal, in either your Menu or Content Manager, to allow your users to select their preferred language.
Tip: If you're using the same menu for all pages (set in your Site Manager), you only need to add the Google Translate plugin once to your menu, to enable language selection across your whole PetchCMS website.
For a full list of the languages available view Google Translate
RSS feeds let users subscribe to your website so they're automatically notified when your site is changed or updated. PetchCMS automatically creates a number of feeds for your site and allows you to integrate RSS in many ways.
Users can subscribe to all new content on your site or a specific page only. Users can also subscribe to any search results returned by the Search Plugin - so they are updated about a specific subject. Users can even subscribe to the comments related to a specfic page or content block.
Users subscribe to a feed by simply clicking on the feed URL. Example Feeds:
PetchCMS automatically generates some of these links - above both page and content reviews, and also immediately above any search results returned by the Search Plugin and Browse Users Plugin.
There's a few really easy ways to add these feeds to your pages yourself - the AddThis.com Plugin or the RSS Sitemap Plugin. Below is a couple of PetchCMS feeds combined using the RSS Mashup Plugin to display the feeds as HTML.
