What is a good way to manage the content of the pages in the Gaya framework?

Hello, Does anyone works with a flash WYSIWYG editor that can edit the content
of the pages in the GAIA framework?

For our project we have a external php expert who wrote a CMS editor, with an html WYSIWYG editor
to edit the text. The text is saved through a mysql database with a php script.
Personal i am not a fan of this cms, because standard html works different as flash html
This data is accesable  in our framework using a amf php call.

So before i am going to try to write my own WYSIWYG editor, perhaps someone has already done this.
Or made a usefull application to manage the content of the pages.


Does anyone have some suggestions for a back-end system in combination of the GAIA framework?

Regards,
Chris.

Im doing research on the same thing... it gets somewhat complex to me...
try these links for starters. The best resource at the moment seems to be MODx.

http://www.gaiaflashframework.com/index.php?topic=1452.0
http://www.gaiaflashframework.com/index.php/topic,834.msg3616.html#msg3616

http://stuff.nothingmatters.co.uk/2007/01/20/MODx-a-cms-for-flash/
http://stuff.nothingmatters.co.uk/2007/07/25/modx-a-cms-for-flash-the-follow-up/

http://modxcms.com/learn/solutions/flash-cms.html

If you get it going ... leme know

Thanks for the links, i will look into this. 

Im doing research on the same thing... it gets somewhat complex to me...
try these links for starters. The best resource at the moment seems to be MODx.

http://www.gaiaflashframework.com/index.php?topic=1452.0
http://www.gaiaflashframework.com/index.php/topic,834.msg3616.html#msg3616

http://stuff.nothingmatters.co.uk/2007/01/20/MODx-a-cms-for-flash/
http://stuff.nothingmatters.co.uk/2007/07/25/modx-a-cms-for-flash-the-follow-up/

http://modxcms.com/learn/solutions/flash-cms.html

If you get it going ... leme know

This examples uses Modx Evolution but there is beta version of Modx Revolution which has new core and new architecture. I've tested 6 diffrent open source cms's (Modx Evolution, Modx Revolution, CMS MS, Typolight, Pixie, Website Baker) and compared them due tu use with flash. In my opinion the best choice for now is Modx Revolution.

ModX certainly does seem a good CMS solution,

The way to work it i assume is to disable certain features like navigation as this is going to really bugger up the Gaia site, if you've got clients clicking here there and everywhere.


As anyone had any joy with using it to upload image and output xml for flash sites to hook into?

Would the Modx site take the place of the html site that gaia automatically generates? how would this work?

There are couple ways to connect flash and modx and it really depends on what you want to achieve.
You can create template for pages that will format content to xml and when you request that page from flash you get xml to play with.
With amfphp you can use modx framework to retrieve data directly from DB (I've done that and it works great).
Modx site could coexist with flash site (as replacements) and this is really easy since modx revo introduced contexts (from docs: Contexts - this allows developers to assign different views of your site based on pretty much any criteria. This means native multi-sites, subdomains, running the core outside of webroot). So you can create different context for html and for flash.
For small sites when you don't change the structure you could disable structure change in manager (it has nice security model) and locally create site.xml file.
For larger sites you could write add-on that automatically creates site.xml based on entire content.

Thanks, thats certainly food  for thought, do you have any working examples of hooking the two together?

I don't have any working example but this is simple demonstration class which can be used with amfphp. You can google how to connect amfphp and flash (the is plenty of resources)

Code:

$dirname = "path/to/modxrevo";
require_once "$dirname/config.core.php";
require_once MODX_CORE_PATH.'model/modx/modx.class.php';

class modX_API {

var $modx;
function modX_API()
{
$this->modx = new modX();
//initializing web context
$this->modx->initialize('web');
}

function getDocument($id)
{
$criteria = array(
   'published' => 1,
   'id' => $id
);
$document = $this->modx->getObject('modDocument',$criteria);
//as $document is result from db query you must fetch this to array
return $document->toArray();
}

}

This is nice article how object works in revo: http://bobsguides.com/revolution-objects.html
In near future (2 months or so) I'm planning to write a set of classes (for easy access to site structure and content) to help me connect modx and flash. I'll probably do this in ZendAmf since amfphp is dead (at lest for now) and zendamf is pushed by adobe. When this happen I'll definitely post about it (it's time to give back something to the community).

ok, i didn't think you needed to use amfphp too,

i was thinking there was a least a couple of methods to tackle this...

use modx to manage the content only, it is going to be too complicated & messy to have clients mucking around with the site structure and you're going to loose gaia functionality as you can't scaffold on the fly?

i was thinking that the modx can output xml through ditto - i've read although i haven't had time to work this part out yet?!

i was then going to populate the html SEO site that gaia automatically creates and the flash site together, but was thinking could the modx site just replace the SEO gaia site somehow is this possible? rather than having three sites?

use modx to manage the content only, it is going to be too complicated & messy to have clients mucking around with the site structure and you're going to loose gaia functionality as you can't scaffold on the fly?

It will work fine for small sites as you can allow clients to edit only pages that already exists so they can't change structure. To use scaffolding you need to have local xml file (I think...) so you have to generate it somehow from cms (through ditto is one way) and download or create it manually.

i was thinking that the modx can output xml through ditto - i've read although i haven't had time to work this part out yet?!

To generate site xml through ditto you need to have good knowledge on how templates works in modx (and templates in general too).

i was then going to populate the html SEO site that gaia automatically creates and the flash site together, but was thinking could the modx site just replace the SEO gaia site somehow is this possible? rather than having three sites?

If this would work it would be pretty easy way to get content from cms. I've briefly looked at how gaia creates SEOAsset and I think I will work just fine without any hacks. If you set path to article in seo attribute it should work fine since you get html file from that source.

i was then going to populate the html SEO site that gaia automatically creates and the flash site together, but was thinking could the modx site just replace the SEO gaia site somehow is this possible? rather than having three sites?

I've found some time to test this and it works just fine. I've set seo attribute to point at path to my article and create simple template for it containing just content. I've traced assets.seo.xml value and it contains html code for requested site. It works when you provide full path like: "http://serveraddress/pathto/article.html" or relative path like: "modxrevo/pathto/article.html". I didn't test it without friendly url in modx but this shouldn't  make any difference.  You have to be careful when creating template because it needs to be well formatted. SEOAsset extends XMLAsset and all unclosed tags like <BR> will cause xml parser to throw an error (this can be fixed by using <![CDATA[ ]]> when needed).
Of course to use all features provided by gaia you need to create specific template that will look like site generated by gaia but it shouldn't be difficult.