Multiple content areas without TV's?

Hey, I’m totally new to CMS’s and I’m trying to figure out how to add more than one editable content area on a page. More often than not my pages have content in multiple columns, all of which need to be easily editable through the WYSIWYG editor. My clients are really not interested in learning HTML, and they really shouldn’t be forced to do that anyway.

I was previously using Wordpress, however the options there were limited to custom fields, which are not really a good option as they don’t allow non-html formatting. So I switched to Modx, thinking that surely this seemingly basic function would exist in this application. Unlike WP, it is a true CMS after all. However, to my disappointment TV’s seem to be no different to WP’s custom fields. I can’t do even the most basic formatting without resorting to HTML. Of course, this might be just me, am I not using those TV’s properly?

I haven’t yet tried the solution suggested at http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/Multiple_content_areas as it feels like a dirty hack to me, but I guess I will if that’s the only option. Does anyone have a better solution for this?

Other than this major problem, I really love Modx, which actually makes it even more frustrating.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Create a template variable and select "Rich Text" for the Input Type. This will get you a RTE for client input.

Sweet, it really works! Thanks a lot, you just saved my day. I had actually done just that, but somehow managed not to notice it had created an input field beneath the main content input field. Well, on with the studies now...

TVs are powerful and fun. Its a good idea to create a test project and just try take to take all the TV combinations for a test drive.

When it comes to using content generated by a RTE in tight space like a sidebar column I would be very careful and do some real cross browser testing. RTEs can be unpredictable with the code they generate. They often pad content in surprise paragraph tags for example.

Another option is just to present a series of custom made TVs for secondary column content like headlines, paragraphs and unordered lists etc. These you can style with CSS. When you create the TV’s you can add comments which can be visual instructions via the Manager for your clients.

Thanks for the tip. Right now I’m indeed just setting up a test site, and have barely scratched the surface of what modx can really do. A quick test revealed no problems with RTE code output though. But as soon as I get everything up and running I’ll do some more thorough testing.

The only reason I mentioned it is that space in secondary columns can be tight. If you present a full RTE option to be used in a sidebar you will need to be sure that your CSS will cary the day. Having an end user/client experiment with all the font and size choices may impact the overall effectiveness of the design you create. Just a thought...

Quote from: arto at Mar 08, 2010, 09:18 PM

Sweet, it really works! Thanks a lot, you just saved my day. I had actually done just that, but somehow managed not to notice it had created an input field beneath the main content input field. Well, on with the studies now...

Keep in mind that Rich Text has to be checked for the page for this type of TV to show up. I’d also recommend you read the docs for ManagerManager (under asssets/plugins). You can then create custom tabs and move your TVs around so they don’t all appear beneath the Content RTE (and you can even hide that as well). I believe there is a recent update to ManagerManager as well that you may wish to install over the version packaged with Evo 1.0.2.

For the record, the reason I created that tutorial was because I needed a method that allowed me to insert an unlimited number of extra content areas (you can only have as many TVs as you create manually). I knew about the TV method but it didn’t suitmy exact situation.

When I have time I will expand the wiki page to better explain the point of the technique it describes, and will add the TV method to it as well.

When it comes to using content generated by a RTE in tight space like a sidebar column I would be very careful and do some real cross browser testing. RTEs can be unpredictable with the code they generate. They often pad content in surprise paragraph tags for example.

yeah, this gets me all the time, especially when i want to call a chunk from within RTE, since you almost never want <p>CHUNK_CONTENTS</p>, but within the RTE, in the drop down where you select paragraph, header 1, header 2, etc... there is a "div" option, which lets you have <div>CHUNK_CONTENTS</div>, and unless you put padding onto all div tags in your css (which... good lord... i would hope not!) you won’t have the padding issues.