You know what? I think I’m just going to cheat on this one. In a fresh installation of Frog there is already page called Archive. It just happens to be titled archive but it’s also of page type archive.

To start, I’ll rename archive to blog.

I’ll also leave the default articles (subpages) that were already there.

If we go check it out it seems we now have a simple blog.

Gorgeous. It also looks like I can add a post by adding a child “page” to the blog page.

If we edit our blog page we can edit how these articles are displayed, change the number of posts listed, the order they’re sorted in, etc.

<?php $last_articles = $this->children(array('limit'=>5, 'order'=>'page.created_on DESC')); ?>
<?php foreach ($last_articles as $article): ?>
<div class="entry">
  <h3><?php echo $article->link($article->title); ?></h3>
  <?php echo $article->content(); ?>
  <p class="info">Posted by <?php echo $article->author(); ?> on <?php echo $article->date(); ?>  
     <br />tags: <?php echo join(', ', $article->tags()); ?>
  </p>
</div>
<?php endforeach; ?>

Well I’m fine with that but I don’t see any code in there that will truncate my post and provide a “read more” link like a normal blog. To make sure I post a new article filled with lorem ipsum and sure enough it runs on and on.

I’ll have to fix that. Luckily there’s instructions on the FrogCMS website: Display teaser with Read-more link. Basically they suggest creating another content part like we did for the Gong of the Day in Part 3. We’ll have a content part named “extended” which will be the full article and the “body” part will be the teaser.

In the “blog” page, I’ve added this code:

 <p><?php if ($article->hasContent('extended')) echo $article->link('Continue Reading&#133;'); ?></p>

Now I have to add the “extended” content holder to my layout so it looks like this:

<div id="content-right">
 
	<h3><?php echo $this->title(); ?></h3>
	<?php echo $this->content(); ?>
	<?php if ($this->hasContent('extended')) echo $this->content('extended'); ?> 
 
</div>

Finally, I need to add the new content part tab to my blog post page “Squirrels!”

I’ll keep a few lines of lorem ipsum in the “body” and put what the rest of the article into “content”. Save it up and whoop there it is.

It worked but I’m not sure I like this system very much. It would probably be a little more slick to reverse this around and have the “body” be the main article and have a tab called “teaser”. It also wouldn’t be too difficult to wrap a PHP function around the content output and truncate it to automatically make a teaser.

There is also a sidebar tab left over from the original setup.

There you can see come code for displaying a listing of posts by month.

<?php $article = $this->find('articles'); ?>
<?php $archives = $article->archive->archivesByMonth(); ?>
 
<h3>Archives By Month</h3>
<ul>
<?php foreach ($archives as $date): ?>
  <li><a href="<?php echo BASE_URL . $this->url .'/'. $date . URL_SUFFIX; ?>"><?php echo strftime('%B %Y', strtotime(strtr($date, '/', '-'))); ?></a></li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

There’s all kinds of stuff you can do although it does take some minor PHP knowledge and an idea of the FrogCMS functions.

Next I’m going to look into the user management system. I’d like to pretend I’m setting up an “editor” account for the client and feel out how they would experience adding and manipulating content.

Next: Playing with FrogCMS (Part 6: User Management)