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--- videos:managing_static_content [2021/11/09 11:32] – created demiankatz
+++ videos:managing_static_content [2021/11/10 15:34] – [Transcript] demiankatz
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 // This is a machine-generated transcript and will be corrected as time permits. //
-:!: Coming soon
+ hello and welcome to this month's
+viewfind tutorial video which is about
+managing static content
+when i say static content i'm just
+referring to the ability to create
+custom html pages to present information
+within your viewfind instance
+or to embed that type of information
+within some of viewfind's existing
+displays
+viewfinder is of course not meant to be
+a content management system and so i
+certainly wouldn't recommend using it to
+build your entire web presence but
+sometimes it's useful to be able to
+place a page of custom content into the
+context of viewfind and so we provide
+some tools to enable you to do this and
+to also take advantage of ufind's
+internationalization support along the
+way
+uh when you get viewfind out of the box
+it ships with a couple of examples of
+static content which are really just
+meant to be overridden
+as you customize the system uh these
+include the ask a librarian and faqs
+pages
+which show in the footer and just
+contain placeholder information
+if you click through to them
+so
+creating these static content pages is
+pretty easy uh it's just a matter of
+putting templates in a particular
+directory within your theme
+and then vufine does the rest
+let me quickly show you uh where this
+lives in the default theme and then
+we'll move forward to creating some
+content of our own
+so if i
+go into viewfinds themes directory and
+look under bootstrap 3
+in the templates
+content directory
+you'll see that we have
+an
+faq.phtml
+an asklibrary.phtml
+and a couple of other utility templates
+that are actually used by the content
+display code
+but the important thing to take away
+here is that if you see a file that
+starts with faq
+and you go to your browser and add
+content slash faq after the base url uh
+viewfinder will display that template to
+you providing a really easy way to
+render custom content
+if you also supports markdown so if you
+want to create your content using uh the
+markdown language instead of php html
+templates uh that's available as well
+which may be more convenient if you're
+working with a content development team
+that's less comfortable with coding
+because the markdown standard is widely
+used
+so with that background out of the way
+let me do some quick demos and i'll
+start by showing you how to create a
+markdown based content page in your
+viewfind instance
+right now we're looking at viewfind's
+core boot print three theme
+so let's switch to our custom tutorial
+template so we're in a better position
+to customize some things
+i'm just going to switch to my local
+config viewfind config.ini file
+and i'm going to comment out the
+bootprint 3 setting to activate my
+tutorial setting
+now if i go back to my browser and
+refresh
+we get to see
+the custom tutorial theme that we've
+been using in some of these videos
+now that we're on our custom theme
+creating a new uh content page is as
+simple as going into our theme folder so
+under themes tutorial
+templates
+uh we need to create a new folder called
+content
+since this is the first content page
+we're creating
+uh and in this content folder
+uh we can just create a new file
+so as i said earlier the file name will
+correspond with the url where the
+content will be displayed so i'm going
+to call this markdown demo
+but the extension of the file will tell
+if you find how to render the content so
+if i were to end this in dot p html it
+would render as a standard php template
+but of course i want to demonstrate
+markdown
+so i'm going to
+name the file dot md instead
+so now i have an empty file and i'm
+going to put some markdown in it
+i'm not going to go into any depth on
+the markdown standard during this video
+because there are lots of tutorials and
+cheat sheets out there
+but it's widely used you probably run
+across it somewhere and even if you
+haven't it's pretty easy to learn
+uh in any case i'm going to start with
+pound my title because prefixing text
+with the pound is how you create a
+heading in markdown
+and then i'm just going to put a line of
+content i'm going to say this is the
+star
+markdown demo star to show some
+formatting
+and i'm going to say here is a
+bracket
+link
+parenthesis and i'm going to link
+this to the view find home page just for
+fun
+and that's it
+so i'm saving this file of markdown
+now if i return to my browser
+and i go to content markdown demo as
+part of my viewfinder url
+there is my markdown rendered in view
+viewfind
+also you might notice that the
+tab in my browser actually shows my
+title
+the markdown parser is smart enough to
+take top level headings and use those as
+the page title for you
+and if i were to click this link
+it would take me to the viewfind home
+page so
+it's that simple you can create mark
+down to your heart's content and serve
+it up through viewfind so you can create
+institution specific pages custom help
+screens whatever you like
+i also mentioned earlier
+that the content display system supports
+internationalization so if your
+viewfinder instance supports multiple
+languages
+you can create multiple versions of your
+static content and viewfind will display
+the appropriate one based on the
+language that's currently active
+uh the the way you do this
+is simply uh to put an underscore and a
+language code
+on the end of your file names so i'll do
+a quick demo of this as well
+i will create a new file called i18n
+underscore
+en.phtml
+so this is going to create a content
+page called i18n you know the common
+abbreviation for internationalization
+uh and this is going to be the english
+language version of that and i'm
+indicating that with the underscore en
+at the end of the file name
+uh and this demo i'm just going to do
+standard phtml templates i could just as
+easily use markdown here it makes no
+difference
+i'm just showing both versions for
+demo purposes
+so then i can say in here this is in
+english
+and since this wouldn't be a very
+exciting demo if i didn't have another
+language as well
+i'm going to create another file called
+i18n underscore fr.phtml
+for french and i'm going to write in
+here this is not in french but we can
+pretend
+i will save that
+so now if i go back to my browser
+i need to go to the right browser
+uh if i go back to my browser
+and i edit my url so that it is content
+slash i18n
+after the base viewfind url i see my
+this is an english message
+then if i switch my language to french
+this is not in french but we can pretend
+it's that simple
+i should also uh make a quick note on
+how the default behavior works for these
+templates uh if you have
+a number of languages
+but you don't have templates for all of
+them so for example if i switch this to
+german
+it actually says this is in english
+the reason for that
+is that in
+config.ini you're able to set a default
+language for your site
+and if viewfind is unable to find a
+template for the requested language
+it will next search for a template in
+the default language as a fallback so in
+this example german is not available
+english is the default language
+configured in config.ini
+so viewfinder decides to display the
+english template
+if there were no english template it
+would next look to see if there were
+simply an i18n.php
+template with no language code at all it
+would use that next
+and only if all of those options failed
+would it give up and throw an error
+about content being unavailable
+in any case that shows you all the
+capabilities for creating static pages
+in markdown or php and with or without
+internationalization support
+one thing that uh you might want to do
+though
+is give one of your content pages a
+custom url
+uh as you notice by default all of the
+content pages have urls with slash
+content slash something in them
+but
+through the magic of the laminas router
+system it's not very difficult at all to
+give these any url you like
+so i'll show you that really quickly
+first of all
+let's go into the
+core viewfinder module so i'm going to
+my view find home module viewfinder
+and i'm looking at the configuration
+here so in my viewfind module i'm going
+to the configuration directory and
+opening module.config.php
+and at the top of this file
+are all of the route definitions which
+we've talked about in the past but one
+of these routes
+is called content page
+and it is this route which does all the
+magic of resolving content for you
+so it's a segment based route and it
+looks for slash content slash something
+when it encounters a match for that
+pattern
+it calls the content action of the
+content controller and passes through
+part of the url as a parameter called
+page
+so this is how
+you're able to type in a content url and
+have viewfinds code map that to an
+appropriate template to display
+but if you want to give a different url
+to a content page you can simply copy
+this route into your local module make a
+few small changes
+and get the effect you want
+so i'm going to do exactly that i'm
+going to copy this whole route
+and then i'm going to go into my local
+tutorial module and into the
+configuration
+and the module config
+so in here
+we have
+a custom route that we set up in a past
+video
+and i'm just going to paste in
+that content route right above it
+uh and the formatting is a little ugly
+here but i'm not going to worry about
+that right now just bear with me
+so first of all
+we want to give every route a unique
+name because we don't want to override
+the existing content page route we want
+all of our content to keep working
+and if i didn't change this this content
+page route would override the core
+version
+so instead i'm just going to call this
+content demo
+uh and then
+i'm going to go to my options and i'm
+going to replace this content
+page thing
+with the url that i want to use so let's
+say we want to show that markdown demo
+at a url
+called
+markdown demo
+i can just put that in
+uh
+because there's no page placeholder
+anymore i can remove that constraint
+and instead i can go into the defaults
+and i can just hard code a page value
+here
+and this is going to be markdown demo
+it's that simple i've created a route
+named content demo
+it's going to look for
+a url that just says markdown demo
+and when it encounters that url it's
+going to call the content action of the
+content controller and it's going to
+pass it a page parameter of markdown
+demo
+which is exactly the same as using the
+other route to go to slash content slash
+markdown demo
+so let me show you if i now
+go here and i just put mark down demo on
+the end of my viewfinder url
+i get to see my markdown page
+so in this way you can seamlessly
+incorporate static content into your url
+structure
+as long as you're careful not to collide
+with existing urls or route names
+so uh
+that covers all of the standalone page
+content but what about incorporating
+this type of content into an existing
+page
+viewfinder has something called content
+blocks
+which are currently used on the various
+search home pages
+to drop in interesting information
+so for example
+if i just go
+to
+my search home screen
+and i'm going to set this back to
+english for a moment
+uh you will see
+that we have this facet information here
+and this is actually being dropped in as
+a content block
+this is a configurable setting
+that you can find in searches.ini and
+all of you finds search backends have a
+content block configuration so that you
+can put different content on each of
+their home pages
+let me show you
+uh in practice here
+so if i go to
+view finds main config viewfind
+directory
+and i look at the searches.ini file
+which controls the behavior of the main
+default solar-based search
+near the bottom of this file
+there's a setting called content
+and this is where
+we configure the content blocks for the
+home page
+by default
+two content blocks are set up one is
+called ils status monitor this normally
+does not display anything but it will
+check to see if your ils is offline and
+if it is it will display a warning
+message that some functionality may be
+unavailable
+if you're not using an ils or you don't
+want this feature you might consider
+commenting this out
+following that
+there's a facet list content block which
+is what creates that facet list i was
+showing you and again if you don't like
+that you can simply turn off this
+setting to get rid of it
+and you can also
+choose from some of the other content
+blocks that are listed in the comments
+up here
+or you can build your own but for today
+what i want to show you is a content
+block called template based
+which allows you to drop static content
+onto your home page
+in much the same way as you are able to
+create
+the static content pages i just showed
+you
+so i am going to demonstrate that for
+you right now
+so first of all
+because
+this demo instance doesn't have a custom
+searches.ini yet
+i am going to copy
+the
+coresearches.ini file into my local
+settings directory so i have a place
+to do some custom configuration
+so i'm
+copying from
+viewfind home config viewfind
+searches.ini into
+local
+config viewfind searches.ini
+and then
+i'm going to scroll down here so i can
+customize my content
+so to turn this on i simply need to add
+another content block settings so i can
+say content bracket bracket
+and the brackets are important because
+this is a repeating setting and we want
+to be sure
+that we don't override the setting
+rather than adding to it
+and i could say equals
+template based which is the name of the
+content block
+colon
+i18n
+we just need to give
+a template base name
+for the content block to use
+in this case i'm choosing i18n because
+that allows me to be really lazy and
+simply copy and paste the templates
+that i created for the earlier full page
+example
+the only difference is what directory
+the files go in within my theme
+so for
+page content i use the content directory
+for content block content
+i just need to create a different
+directory to put my files into
+and that directory is
+content block with a capital c and a
+capital b
+and under that
+a folder called
+template based
+so i can now just take my two
+i18n
+templates
+copy them
+paste them into here
+and make sure that i saved my
+configuration properly
+it's also worth noting
+that the order of the content settings
+affects the order of the display so i've
+set this up so that the template will
+appear
+above
+the
+facet list
+and below any ils related messages but i
+could move this line around if i wish to
+do things differently
+and now
+i come back here and refresh the page
+the message this is in english has
+appeared above my list of facets so it
+is working and if i change my language
+to french
+it says this is not in french but we can
+pretend
+so the template-based content block
+follows all of the same rules and
+conventions as the full page templates
+so you can use the language suffixes on
+the file names or not as you prefer
+you can use php templates or markdown as
+you prefer
+it's just a nice way to be able to
+quickly and easily embed messages
+wherever you need them
+the next step
+that might be useful would be to have
+similar functionality in a
+recommendation module so that we could
+put messages into search results uh and
+as of the recording of this video uh we
+haven't actually implemented such a
+thing but it would be pretty
+straightforward to do so so if anyone
+has a need for this by all means feel
+free to open a jira ticket and we can
+get that feature incorporated into a
+future release
+in any case
+thanks for your time and for listening
+to this i hope this makes it easier for
+you to share information through your
+viewfind instance
+and we'll have more for you next month
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