Introduction

When implementing new features for their CMS Made Simple sites, people's first thought is often some kind of PHP extension: a User-Defined Tag or a Module. It turns out, though, that there is a whole class of problems that can be solved using Smarty or the Core modules.

This chapter will show you a number of tricks which may not be obvious at first, but that will open up a whole new world of possibilities.

There are many advantages to using the built-in approaches when you can. You save the overhead of installing Modules or Tags, and you don't have to worry as much about upgrades.

Most of the recipes that are presented here will serve to simplify the maintenance of your sites, or at least add useful capabilities without adding too much complexity. Several recipes are oriented towards simplifying tasks for the person or people who will be administering the site as editors or writers. It's important to remember that any time you reduce complexity for the people creating content for a site, you're reducing the opportunity for error.

As a web developer, one of the primary reasons for using CMS Made Simple is to allow your customer to take over a website once you've worked your magic. By simplifying the task for them, you're saving yourself support calls — and saving your customer's budget, so they can hire you for enhancing site capabilities in the future. By building a site in an easy-to-maintain way, you are essentially guaranteeing yourself more interesting jobs rather than tedious jobs like fixing broken formatting.