l have recently decided to try out MangBlog for the new cfmldeveloper.com site and I have to say I really like it much better than BlogCFC (sorry Ray).

Because MangoBlog allows you to add custom pages you can pretty much use it to create your entire web site with a basic CMS as long you don't need to do anything complex on your pages, at which point you may find the tinyMCE editor too restrictive.

When you add a custom page to MangoBlog the "title" is used not only on the page but also on the navigation menu, which I didn't find too useful as I did not want the menu text and page title to be the same. So I was instantly thrown in at the deep end with a requirement to customise MangoBlog, which thankfully turned out to be very easy as it is very well written and easy to understand.

MangoBlog is written in classic CFML style using imported tag libraries and <mango: mytag attributes> syntax as apposed to using the OO style frameworks that are popular these days.

Adding a custom page title is a snip.

When adding a new page, simply add a new custom field like this

label:    page title
key:      pagetitle
Value:   My Page Title

 

Now edit the page.cfm file in your skin folder and edit the code that displays the <mango:Blog title />, it will look something like this depending on your skin.

<h1 id="banner-header"><a href="<mango:Blog url />" accesskey="1"><mango:Blog title /></a></h1>

and change it to this

   <mango:PageProperty ifHasCustomField="pageTitle" customField="pageTitle" />
     <mango:PageProperty ifNOTHasCustomField="pageTitle"><mango:PageProperty title />
   </mango:PageProperty>

This checks for the existance of the "pageTitle" custom field on each page, it is exists then it will display that value, otherwise it will display the title.

You can use the same method to insert any custom field values on any page.

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