Orbis CMS Developer Documentation

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3. Integration

3.1 Introduction to development with Orbis

Orbis CMS is very flexible in the sense that it requires nearly no adjustments to existing websites to be able to integrate. The main concept of the CMS is to allow you as web designer/developer to finish a client's site completely and then easily make content editable. There are not many requirements for a website to be integrated successfully with Orbis CMS. You'll have to, however, pay attention to the following:

Because Orbis uses PHP to fetch data from the database, pages (files) with editable content need to be PHP. In normal circumstances, this means that your files should have a .php extension. If you're unable/unwilling to change your files's extensions, read this article on how you can configure your server to parse any files (e.g. files with .html extensions) as PHP.

3.2 Making content editable

As mentioned in the previous section, it's best to finish your website before integrating Orbis CMS with it. After you've made sure that your files are ready to be parsed as PHP (refer to 3.1 Introduction to development with Orbis), you can follow the steps below to make content editable:

  1. Set up pages and editable sections in the CMS, using an administrator account. Set up sections according to your web design (e.g. use the titles for sections that appear in your design), so that clients can identify the position of editable sections in the website by matching the names that appear in the web design and CMS.
  2. Include the Orbis data interface file (orbis.php) in each file you want to have editable content. The best way to do this is to start your files with this code:
    <?php require('orbis.php'); ?>
    <!DOCTYPE html     ...
  3. Add the following code where you'd like to have an editable section:
    <?php echo orbis_data('[Page]', '[Section]'); ?>
    Be sure to replace [Page] and [Section] with the page and name of the section you defined in the CMS. All attributes are case-sensitive.
  4. If you already designed the website with content added in, simply re-create the content with the editors in the CMS. With text, you can easily copy the existing data into WYMeditor (the WYMIWYM editor used in the CMS).

3.2 Guidelines for web design with Orbis

There are a few guidelines for successful web design with Orbis CMS. Follow these guidelines to get the most out of the CMS:

  1. Don't work with images inside sections you want to make editable as text.
  2. When you want to insert a text editable section, you don't need to add <p> before and </p> after the code specified above, as WYMeditor will automatically wrap content edited by the user in appropriate tags.
Orbis CMS DevDocs - licensed under the FDL v1.3 or later. Orbis CMS is an innovation by Novo Web Solutions.