Black Square's CMS Extension Modules

In our last post, we looked at the core modules of the Black Square CMS. On their own, they will allow you to maintain a very simple site. Each page will need to be individually built, and placed within the menu structure. This arrangement will work for some sites, but many sites will find this limited management very frustrating. The administrator of a site which showcases the work of 150 artists, or sells 500 products, will find it very laborious and tedious to have to create and format a new page for each of these. To solve this problem, we build extension modules for the Black Square CMS.

Every extension module is customised to the individual needs of the site. In some cases we can modify a module we have already written for a previous client, but in many cases we’ll start from scratch. The important concept is that we make sure the module does exactly what the site requires, rather than adjusting the requirements of the site to fit a module we already have.

This , of course, makes it a little difficult to describe these modules, but most will fall into one of these general groups:

News Manager

A news manager is essentially an intermediate step between the standard content module and a blog. It allows the user to regularly add articles to the site without clogging up the menu with articles that are topical and diluting it with less important information. The news manager automatically archives all the news articles, saving a lot of time and menu management.

The basic news manager simply collects the article and some meta-data (a title, description and keywords), but it can be modified to collect additional information as well. One common modification creates the events manager, which keeps track of upcoming events. This records the date of the event, and then displays events with the next upcoming event as the most prominent (instead of the most recently added, as is normally the case).

Product Catalogue

As the name implies, this module was originally designed to maintain a collection of products. The products are organised in a hierarchical category system, and each product contains a certain amount of information, including a title, photo, description and price. On the website itself, the navigation and display of the product catalogue are handled automatically.

This module can be extended to handle just about any information object that needs to be categorised and displayed in a nicely formatted template.

Exhibition Manager

An extension to the product catalogue, the exhibition manager has a simpler, linear categorisation system, but allows for much more complex individual items. Specifically designed to handle exhibitions for artists and art galleries, it collects basic information about each exhibition, but also manages a selection of artworks for that gallery. Each artwork, in turn, has a whole range of information about it, in addition to the photo of the work. The gallery also supports video and audio works. In simple terms, the exhibition manager is a catalogue of product catalogues.

Order Manager (with Shopping Cart)

This module allows us to take the product catalogue to market – it allows the customer to actually place orders for the products in a product catalogue. Each product type has different requirements, and some sites have multiple product catalogues, so the shopping cart and subsequent orders must be carefully customised to best record and present the orders for the client. In some cases the module simply collects orders, and notifies the administrator, while others will allow for online payments, and still others will automatically synchronise with the client’s offline order management system, so they don’t actually need to do anything at all to process orders.

These four basic types cover the majority of the extension modules we develop, but we can develop modules to manage just about any requirement.