BraDypUS CMS
This document sums up some basic concept about how BraDyCMS works, about how you can organize articles, menus and how to format your URLs in order to get a beautiful and functional web site.
More detailed documentation, on specific issues, tutorials and other help can be found in the Documentation item of the main menu.
Keep it simple, stupid is the basic principle that moved us towards the development of this CMS.
We wanted to create a simple to use, yet versatile CMS, that we could use in various our projects, and than we shared our work on Github, making BraDyCMS an open source project.
Our principal aim was to get have a powerful tool for content managing with a easy way to organize the content and to display (template system) to public. That’s why we say that BraDypCMS is a designer-oriented CMS.
The creation of a simple web site or of a big web portal passes through 3 steps:
That’s all BradyCMS does!
All content is organized in articles. Articles are organized using tags. No sections, no categories, just tags! Tags a far more elastic way to keep your content organized.
It’s up to you to design the structure of your data, and you can build liquid or static categories and sections just using tags. Which category belongs to which section? Nested categories? No need for this, tags can make a single article can belong to many categories and/or section.
Article apple can be tagged with tags fruit, food, edible, tasty; it means it belongs to all this categories and you don’t need sub-categories. If you need to display all articles of sub-category edible of category fruit just search for all articles having both tags fruit and edible!
Each article has the following default fields:
Title: this will also be used for page HTML title tagText ID: this is the UNIQUE name of your article. Keep this simple and meaningful: it will be also the URL of the articleSorting: custom sorting for list viewsKeywords: this is mainly used for page HTML keywords tagAuthor: The author of the articleIs published: you can save drafts and publish in a second moment using this flagCreation date: Article creation date stampPublishing date: You can use this field if you want to schedule the publishing of the articleExpiration date: You can use this field if you want to schedule the expiration date of your contentSummary: This will be used also for the page HTML description tag. Can be useful also in list view, as it can be used as a preview of article contentsText: Finally, the article main contentIf you need more fields for your articles, you can add them by your own. There is a simple and safe procedure adapt the database schema to match your needs.
For a detailed guide check the How to customize database schema guide.
Very often we need to have a specific image linked to an article. And we want to use it in different sizes, for different purposes (slideshows, thumbnails, big images, etc). We know that scaling and adjusting manually all images, uploading and organizing in folders, establishing different filenames and filenames patterns and can be very time consuming.
BraDyCMS simplifies all this. Uploading, resizing in different sizes, organizing in folders is as easy as dragging an image from your computer to the article’s edit form. Add all the image sizes you want to have for each article in the site configuration module. Drag and drop images in the right part of the article edit form! Images will be named with the article ID (not text id) and will be converted to have the jpg extension. BradyCMS will create the folder system for you.
For example, if you have defined three sizes for your article images, 600x300, 450x225 and 200x100, and you upload an image for the article with ID 5, your images will be available at the following paths:
BraDyCMS has a built in system for loading, organizing and editing images. You can load images and files, create folders, delete, and edit them using a GUI interface.
You can copy, move, convert in multiple formats, resize and crop images easily and safely.
Photo galleries are awesome! That’s why we have built an easy to use tool to upload files with a simple drag&drop, create thumbnails with a click, add and translate caption, ecc. You can then easily embed your galleries in articles body by using a simple fast tag [[gallery]]here_galley_name[[/gallery]] (click to learn mode).
You can have all the menus you need, and translate them in several languages. You can also nest menu items in multiple levels. And you do not need difficult code to do this: just drag & drop menu items to reorder or nest them. You can find more on how to create menu in the FAQ section of the documentation.
Retriving articles from the database to use in the templates is simple! BraDyCMS has two methods that you can use to build meaningful (and search engines friendly) URLs. Let’s suppose http://mysite.ext it the URL of your installation:
http://mysite.ext/myfirstarticle.all extention to tell the CMS you are using tags:http://mysite.ext/tag1.all: will retrieve all articles tagged with tag tag1http://mysite.ext/tag1-tag2-tag3.all: will retrieve all articles tagged with all listed (hyphen separated) tags tag1, tag3, tag3http://mysite.ext/tag1~tag2~tag3.all: will retrieve all articles tagged with any of the listed (tilde separated) tags tag1, tag3, tag3This way, if you want to show all web related news of year 2013, just tag the articles with all these tags (news, 2013, web) and use this URL: http://mysite.ext/news-2013-web.all
Learn more on menu and URL in the FAQ section of the documentation.
Please read all docs to learn how to translate articles and menu items, translate BraDyCMS admin control panel in your language, Create and use beautiful user forms, author plugins and extend functionality and report all problems you may encounter on Github.