Here are some useful tips and tricks that help you get the most out of your PetchCMS plugins, allowing you to customise features on your site, to create your ideal website.
With PetchCMS you can add plugins to any items created in either your Content or Menu Manager.
Each
time you add a plugin, you can select unique settings for that plugin.
Example: When adding the 'Image Gallery' plugin, you can add it a
number of times on a page, and choose different images to display each
time it's added.
Plugins settings are linked to the ID of the
content block or navigation title to which the plugin was added. When
adding a new title or content block, the ID does not yet exist. It's
therefore impossible to edit plugin options when adding a new items in
the Menu and Content Managers.
However, plugins with no
options to configure can be added to new items without any problems.
But if a plugin requires options to be configured, these options will
need to be set after the new title or content block has been saved.
It's
only possible to edit plugin options for an existing navigation title
or content block. So, to edit any plugin options, you have edit
existing items in the Content and Menu Managers. Phew!
If you don't want to add any navigation menus, PetchCMS can add one for you!
A great tip for creating an automated menu across your whole site, is to choose the same menu for all pages in the Site Manager, and then to add the RSS Sitemap Plugin to your menu in the Menu Manager.
All pages and feeds will then be listed in your menu and you never have to update it - unless you want to create a custom menu, of course! Tip: Choose only 1 column in 'Plugin Options', in the Menu Manager.
Learn how to create plugins for PetchCMS, using the built-in Plugin Manager in the PetchCMS Admin Panel.
Some HTML and PHP knowledge is required to design your own plugins, but integrating most popular online tools from around the web should be easy enough for anyone.
Here you'll see how to create a plugin and add it to a 'navigation title' in the Menu Manager.
PetchCMS features a built-in user registration, login and review system. However, with the Google Friend Connect plugins, you can even expand this functionality to users of other social networks!
Google Friend Connect is a fantastic set of tools for adding social content, features and analytics to any website and dramatically increases the level of interaction and exposure a website receives. Users from Yahoo!, Google, OpenID and more can sign in, add comments, contact each other, subscribe and more.
By using PetchCMS with Google Friend Connect
you can remove the need for multiple user accounts across different
websites, making signup, login and messaging much faster and vastly
increasing the level of user-interaction on your site.
Sign up to Google Friends Connect and then add your site address. In minutes, you can enjoy the benefits of this powerful user-interaction system, viewing detailed stats and analytics about how your members use your site.
PetchCMS offers a number of Google Friend Connect enabled plugins, so you can include these plugins in the normal way, via either your Content or Menu Managers, to integrate this excellent service.
These plugins require only 1 option - the website ID of your site, created when adding to your site your Google Friends Account. See the Google Plugin page for Google Friend Connect plugins.
PetchCMS lets you create popup tooltips for your images, using the 'Gallery' layout, set in the Page Manager. You can also integrate the brilliant Taggify service for any image on any page, regardless of its layout, in five, sixty-second steps:
Step Two:Create a new plugin, like "taggify.php", add your HTML code (Step One) and save.
Step Three: Add the plugin to any or all of your pages, using the Content or Menu Manager.
Step Four: Bookmark this link - Taggify Editor (Ctrl+D), so it's stored for easy access later.
Step Five: Visit any page that includes the taggify plugin (Step Two), click the 'Taggify Editor Bookmark' (Step Four) in your browser and login to the popup editor to start.
You can then easily select and tag an area inside any image, add some details and save. Example:
The image above shows an example of how taggify can look. For more demos, see Taggify.net
With PetchCMS it's easy to sell domains using the Domain Plugin. Combine the domain plugin with a payment form, and your users can buy available domains from your website.
The next step for you is simply to go and register the chosen domain with your favourite registrar, such as DomainMonster.com, after payment is completed.
