No PHP? No problem!
Posted Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 at 1:58 pm by Marissa (48 posts)
Limitations. We hate them, but we have to live with them.
As web folks, often the source of our limitation is the CMS software that was supposed to set us free. In many cases, the vendor has the server, the vendor makes the software, and more often the not, and there’s no access to server-side scripting, such as PHP. Maybe your CMS has all the features you’re looking for – outside news feeds, photo galleries, calendars, and other fancy widgets. Sometimes, though, it seems that some of the features we covet are missing.
But if you can put JavaScript in your CMS then you can have your CMS and your widgets, too. There are several JavaScript libraries out there, when combined with XML or other data formats, can get you almost anything you want.
Don’t think you can make XML? Think again.
Can you create RSS Feeds in your CMS, or get the information you want to import for your site in RSS format?
- Yes – Then you’ve already got your XML!
- No – My CMS doesn’t allow me to create RSS.
- No problems! In your CMS, see if you put your content on a super-simplified page. As long as it appears consistently, you can use Yahoo Pipes to scrape the content and turn it into an RSS feed or other data format. And if your external content source is set up in a simple, consistent manner, you can scrape that page too.
- Yes but… – Everything is RSS, but you want mix it up a little.
- You can do this too! You can use Yahoo Pipes to mix, match, sort, and filter feeds.
Here’s just a few neat things you can do with JavaScript and XML:
- Customize an RSS Feed for a specific issue, and display it on your site. You can use Yahoo Pipes to create a customized RSS feed, output it to JSON, and use the SPRY JSON dataset to import it into your site. We did this for the IUE-CWA Web site.
- Create a customizable photo galleries and slide shows. There are many excellent JavaScript libraries that can create photo galleries. Jquery has some great ones.
- Make an easy calendar of events. You can create your calendar in Google Calendar, and then export it as XML. From there, you can run it through Yahoo Pipes and make it a JSON file and use it with SPRY. Or you can use Google’s own calendar API.
