There hasn’t been any big announcement yet on Faintmedia but we do have another project idea in mind currently called Venom. Venom is a CMS (Content management system) for the more advanced web designer. It will give you full access to your sites HTML allowing you to change each page.
The Layout Setup
We are currently in the planning stages of Venom right now but one of the things I have planned is a layout system which would work like so:
Say I wanted a generic header for each of my pages. So I make a page with all the information that would be the same in it. I would check a box that says that its just a layout file so that you can’t view that page from the browser itself. Now I would go into the pages that use that header and add some sort of template tag such as:
{layout.HEADER}
HEADER would be the name of the file. So now when I want to change something in the header it would change it on all the pages that have that tag at the top.
There will also be other variables you may use such as the title tag {general.TITLE} or something like that which would allow you to display the title of the page you are on in your header file.
Customize
I have big plans for the customization. If you are someone that enjoys modding scripts this will be easy for you. The backend will run off of XML files that will allow you to create what the button link for your mod says in the admin panel and what the side menu’s options are. It will also tell which PHP files are used for each page. So once you have the XML file setup you just need to code the PHP file’s that will run inside Venom and then it will display all that information when your in that area.
For example: Say I want a store running through PayPal but I don’t want to have a page for every product and I don’t want to do all the PHP in the layout file itself. You could create a customization. So you would have a new button in the admin panel that allows you to set everything up and that will save to the database. You will have a PHP file that tells how it should be displayed and what the variable is that is used to display it. So you would do everything in that part of the script and the only thing that will be in your actual store file would be something like {plugin.STORE} and that would display what you set it to.
I’m sorry for jumping all around with that description but I’m just trying to get out what I’m thinking about this part of the script. I will get a more detailed description out later on when we have started development. I think this feature will have lots of potential because you don’t need to use it for a store. You could use it for a blog or other things like that.
That’s all for now. I just thought I would give you a taste of what’s cooking on our labs.