Frontends: a brief overview
A question that sooner or later you will ask yourself using BEdita is:
"Ok, nice software, now I have all my contents, videos, images into BEdita...what can I do with it?"
Right, now it's time to find out how frontends are built.
BEdita has been developed in a way to let complete freedom in building and setting up frontends: that means, all contents will be used in different ways, and maybe there is not going to be a web interface at all for your publishing. Anyway, a frontend web interface is what you normally would create, and that is what we are going to describe.
At this stage BEdita has a very simple sample frontend template (you will find it in frontend/site.example.com), but not a predefined reference: a common thing in most Web CMS systems out there. That means: you need at least a basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, PHP to create/setup your own frontend. Sure you can use some of the templates you'll find... but BEdita is mostly a powerful tool for webdesigners/webdevelopers.
BEdita provides a rich API and tools to model and manipulate your backend contents easily and concentrate only on the visual frontend creation process (also well known as view in MVC standard pattern).
Without writing a single line of code you will have contents and sections data available as PHP Arrays or XML or RSS and in few simple steps you will be able to display your contents by type, paginate, order them, etc etc..
There are a three frontends in BEdita package now:
- site.example.com - a very simple web site, showing your publication
- debug.example.com - a debug tool to find out how data are structured, how you can use i18n, what helper/tools you have available
- dummy.example.com - a do-nothing frontend that you can copy or rename to create your own from scratch
Every one of them is a basic custom CakePHP application, already configured to use all backend tools available. Before using them or playing with them, we suggest you to understand how CakePHP works in general (if you don't know that framework), but that's not mandatory.